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We used Erlang several years ago. The code base has ~100k lines of code so it should be representative. We abandoned it later and switched to C++ because of performance (mostly in mnesia) and quality issues (some drivers in OTP). We didn't expect too much from performance considering it is functional (which seldom does in place update) but it is still below expectation.

It is understandable though. Just think about how much resources have been put into development of Erlang VM and the runtime/libraries(OTP), and compare it with JVM/JDK. There is just no magic in software development. When talking about high concurrency and performance, the essential things are data layout, cache locality and CPU scheduling etc for your business scenario, not the language.



The tests here confirm your experience, Erlang is for many algorithms significantly slower, even when more cores are used:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/erlang.php


Do not use Erlang for number performance. I tried with EulerProject and create some prime number generators in Erlang. It is slow as hell.

Use it for what it is built for!




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