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Comment by StreamBright | Hacker News Reader

Highly depends on which libraries are you talking about. Essentially you cannot claim that Go will be faster. You can say that fasthttp is faster than Cowboy for a hello world application. Every real world application is much more complex and the stack's performance will be decided by its slowest element.

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Go is faster than Erlang and not by a small margin, Erlang is a dynamic and immutable language, it hurts performance compare to languages like Go.

Some benchmark about pure CPU computation:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Erlang is really slower than Java

Go and Java now:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

You see the big difference, Go and Java are on part but Go usually takes way less memory than Java.

You can't have everything, message passing / immutability with no performance hit.

Elixir/Erlang is slower than java for computationally expensive non tail optimized large struct operations maybe. For simple requests with ginormous thread counts the point of failure is going to get hit way sooner with Java than Erlang. If connecting directly to ETS/Mnesia/Dets instead of converting back and forth between an external persistence layer Erlang/Elixir can be amazingly fast. Doing Map Reduce type operations or performing massive data processing tasks in parallel Erlang/Elixirs is likely going to outperform Java. Anywhere where thread overhead is more critical than raw per thread performance Erlang/Elixir can perform better than alternative solutions.

Instead of downvoting this comment, can someone write why this is incorrect? I realize it might not be a popular writing style, but references were provided.

Because it's not hugely relevant. Yes, Erlang is not a "fast" language by many metrics, but that [very often] is not the reason a team would choose to use it. The sibling and parent comments make up a fairly considered discussion regarding this. A comment in the middle of this conversation saying Go etc win in some benchmark game is a non sequitur

I was replying to someone saying that it depends of the library, the answer is no it doesn't depends of the library, Erlang is not a fast language and it's ok.

There's different kinds of "fast" is the problem.

Are you juggling lots of messages concurrently and orchestrating across complex topologies of nodes? A BEAM language is going to excel. That's why Whatsapp, Discord, and RabbitMQ use Erlang/Elixir.

Are you trying to go really fast in a straight and simple concurrency scenario? Go/Java/C++/Rust is going to be faster than a BEAM language in those scenarios.

You won't want to implement a complex concurrency run-time in Java whereas Elixir is not a good choice for a 3D game engine.

Still, there's nothing wrong with using both.

True. It's highly dependent on what is compared. I should have made my point more clear, however. I care more about what the BEAM provides over performance I can get in other language.

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