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Comment by wolf4earth | Hacker News Reader

Performance is definitely not close to Ruby, this is just blatantly incorrect. Elixir and Erlang can easily hold their ground vs Go.

The BEAM was originally designed to run software for telephone switches. It's often referred to as soft realtime because it is so responsive. It has been battle-tested for now over 3 decades.

Where the BEAM falls flat is pure number crunching but it's blazing fast with binary processing (e.g. string parsing).

A fresh phoenix project where you render a nontrivial template easily reaches sub millisecond response times, without any kind of optimization.

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For CPU intensive tasks, performance _is_ close to Ruby, while both Ruby and Elixir are far behind Go. Soft realtime doesn't mean fast, it just means good std deviation on response time and not a lot of missed deadlines. Fortunately as the article points out, there's always Rustler if you need to optimize while still keeping BEAM crash proof.

That being said, I agree that performance for certain IO intensive applications like web servers is very good, way better than Ruby. Subjectively Phoenix feels way, way faster than Rails in development and is much more performant in production.

>>For CPU intensive tasks, performance _is_ close to Ruby, while both Ruby and Elixir are far behind Go.

Yeah, but how many companies do you know of that perform heavy computations in such large scale that their choice of programming language has a noticeable effect on the result?

I mean, it might matter for tech giants like Google, who need to squeeze every bit of processing power out of their CPUs. For almost everyone else, it will be a non-issue.

It's just that when you say "performance on par with Go", people might imagine you could write a 3D engine in Elixir, which obviously isn't the case.

A fresh phoenix project where you render a nontrivial template easily reaches sub millisecond response times, without any kind of optimization.

Going from Phoenix to Rocket.rs I saw a pretty dramatic speedup on even simple pages. Phoenix was faster than the Rails version of the app, but still slower than a compiled language.

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