I'm aware of Zing and I'm pretty sure it would fare way better in this kind of problem. However, I'm inclined to guess that every time you sink 1 hour of work i

I'm aware of Zing and I'm pretty sure it would fare way better in this kind of problem. However, I'm inclined to guess that every time you sink 1 hour of work into BEAM, there is somewhere between 5-15 hours sunk into OpenJDK and other VMs in Java space. It wins many competitions by brute force alone. Furthermore, Erlang has some things against it in the speed department: It is forced functional. It is dynamically typed (A tracing JIT can somewhat alleviate this problem). But I think the BEAM architecture is pretty sound. It has a lot of things in common with a micro kernel, architecturally. And while micro kernels are not popular currently, they see a lot of use in the embedded space, on sattelite's and so on.