4 ms·

"Elixir is blazing fast" it says, so I follow the link and notice that "blazing fast" apparently means 10x the speed of Ruby. I don't think that phrase means wh

"Elixir is blazing fast" it says, so I follow the link and notice that "blazing fast" apparently means 10x the speed of Ruby. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means.

dikaiosune 10y ago
I'm beginning to wonder how many developers have no clue how much performance a modern computer can achieve. I certainly didn't until recently.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Personally I've seen hundreds of projects in many languages called "blazing fast". To me they're meaningless words. Elixir and Erlang are bad at number crunching, they aren't "fast" at computations like C is. However, because of the amazing piece of tech that is the BEAM, problems that are best solved through multiple processes/actors, concurrency, and distribution appear to be "blazing" fast because the two languages are very good at that type of stuff. Hence the Phoenix web framework being called "blazing fast"—the BEAM is great for servers.
  - muhmi 10y ago
    Also since the VM is optimised for functional programming with no shared memory - it can do tricks you normally cant that help with speed. Like avoid GC in some cases.
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
If a given CPU can do X amount of work, with a C-based language you can maybe get 0.8X performance from that CPU. With elixir you might get 0.4X performance. From that perspective Elixir looks slow. But you can deploy 10 servers and thus get 4X performance overall, with essentially no cost for Elixir. On the other hand to make distributed system in C you will spend 10X the development time. So Elixir is fast in the sense that you get a distributed system much faster, and you can get more overall performance by scaling across multiple CPUs. (And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your C program is really going to only use one core out of the box while elixir will use all four.) These ratios are just examples, of course.
- gregpardo 10y ago
  You can always call a c program for something you absolutely need speed for though right? https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/wiki/Interoperability-with-C https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/wiki/Interoperability-...
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Yup, and dirty NIFs for long running(>1ms) are just around the corner in BEAM.
    - willyk 10y ago
      > And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your > C program is really going to only use one core out > of the box while elixir will use all four.) I think that's a pretty major factor to avoid -- multicore processors are the immediate/commercial foreseeable future of CPUs, so its not inconsequential that Erlang/Elixir allow you to be able to use cheap processes in order take full advantage of this

"Elixir is blazing fast" it says, so I follow the link and notice that "blazing fast" apparently means 10x the speed of Ruby. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means.

dikaiosune 10y ago

I'm beginning to wonder how many developers have no clue how much performance a modern computer can achieve. I certainly didn't until recently.

sotojuan 10y ago
Personally I've seen hundreds of projects in many languages called "blazing fast". To me they're meaningless words. Elixir and Erlang are bad at number crunching, they aren't "fast" at computations like C is. However, because of the amazing piece of tech that is the BEAM, problems that are best solved through multiple processes/actors, concurrency, and distribution appear to be "blazing" fast because the two languages are very good at that type of stuff. Hence the Phoenix web framework being called "blazing fast"—the BEAM is great for servers.
- muhmi 10y ago
  Also since the VM is optimised for functional programming with no shared memory - it can do tricks you normally cant that help with speed. Like avoid GC in some cases.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago

If a given CPU can do X amount of work, with a C-based language you can maybe get 0.8X performance from that CPU. With elixir you might get 0.4X performance. From that perspective Elixir looks slow. But you can deploy 10 servers and thus get 4X performance overall, with essentially no cost for Elixir. On the other hand to make distributed system in C you will spend 10X the development time. So Elixir is fast in the sense that you get a distributed system much faster, and you can get more overall performance by scaling across multiple CPUs. (And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your C program is really going to only use one core out of the box while elixir will use all four.) These ratios are just examples, of course.

gregpardo 10y ago
You can always call a c program for something you absolutely need speed for though right? https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/wiki/Interoperability-with-C https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/wiki/Interoperability-...
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, and dirty NIFs for long running(>1ms) are just around the corner in BEAM.
  - willyk 10y ago
    > And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your > C program is really going to only use one core out > of the box while elixir will use all four.) I think that's a pretty major factor to avoid -- multicore processors are the immediate/commercial foreseeable future of CPUs, so its not inconsequential that Erlang/Elixir allow you to be able to use cheap processes in order take full advantage of this