Even if Elixir had no concurrency goodness I would still prefer it to a language like JS any day of the week. JS is a mess of paradigms and features. Elixir has

Even if Elixir had no concurrency goodness I would still prefer it to a language like JS any day of the week. JS is a mess of paradigms and features. Elixir has a small set of great features: modules, functions, pattern matching, immutable data structures, macros. Regarding your performance point, I'm skeptical. Is it really so easy to reason about the performance of even plain JS code? Maybe you're more familiar with the deep dark crevices of v8 and spidermonkey than I am, but I find v8 to largely be a black box in terms of fine tuning performance. Of course, the big picture optimization is simple enough, but that wouldn't change whether you are using plain JS, Opal, PureScript, or any other language. Yes, a BEAM elixir program can run parallel threads and ElixirScript won't be able to do that because in JS, there are no threads. That doesn't make plain JS faster, just means Elixir will be brought down to the same level as plain JS. I've used what I view to be equally foreign compile to JS languages (ClojureScript, Elm). They of course came with challenges, but fine tuning performance doesn't even make the top 10.