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0 points_old_dude_3y ago0 comments

Almost 10 years ago, i've tested erjang [1] using a medium sized application. Throughput was better than BEAM but latency was terrible.

[1] https://github.com/trifork/erjang/

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6 comments · 2 top-level

pron3y ago· 2 in thread

Ten years ago was two whole technological generations ago in the implementation of OpenJDK's GCs. OpenJDK now has a maximum pause time of under 1ms for heaps up to 16TB.

bitwalker3y ago

I really strongly doubt that GC is a bottleneck for Erlang programs on either the BEAM or the JVM - the sophistication of the scheduler, and the way various language primitives interact with it, is where the BEAM is almost certainly gaining an edge over the JVM. That said, I'm sure there are a subset of programs that _would_ be faster on the JVM, just depends on what metrics are being compared.

pron3y ago

> the sophistication of the scheduler, and the way various language primitives interact with it

That was brought over to the JDK six months ago. The JDK can now spawn millions of Erlang-like processes ("virtual threads") per second.

Erlang is a great inspiration and it does incredibly well with the development resources available to it, but it's hard to compete with the level of engineering investment in the JDK and its state-of-the-art GCs, optimising JIT compilers, and low-overhead in-production tracing and profiling.

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nickpeterson3y ago· 2 in thread

As the other reply noted, I’d be shocked if it wouldn’t be much better now, seeing something like graal being used would be really interesting. I think if Elixir could target beam or jvm it would be an amazing language for many tasks.

throwawaymaths3y ago

> it would be an amazing language

No, it wouldn't. Elixir is getting really fast computation through, e.g. nx, and the user story is incredible (OS install to stable diffusion in 40 minutes, most of which is dicking around figuring out how to install CUDA). Is it easy to run stable diffusion on jvm?

nickpeterson3y ago

I think you might be taking my comment as implying the jvm is better than beam but that isn’t the argument I’m making. Having a strong jvm option means you can cut through a ton of corporate red tape. I don’t need to convince some skeptical CTO if the jvm is reasonable. It’s makes choosing elixir for a project feel about as hard a change as using clojure or groovy.

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