While considering alternatives for Java for a distributed/concurrent/failover/scalable backend environment I discovered Erlang. I’ve spent some time on books and articles where nearly all of them (even Java addicted guys) says that Erlang is a better choice in such environments, as many useful things are out of the box in a less error prone way.
I was sure that Erlang is faster in most cases mainly because of a different garbage collection strategy (per process), absence of shared state (b/w threads and processes) and more compact data types. But I was very surprised when I found comparisons of Erlang vs Java math samples where Erlang is slower by several orders, e.g. from x10 to x100.
Even on concurrent tasks, both on several cores and a single one.
What’s the reasons for that? These answers came to mind:
- Usage of Java primitives (=> no heap/gc) on most of the tasks
- Same number of threads in Java code and Erlang processes so the actor model has no advantage here
- Or just that Java is statically typed, while Erlang is not
- Something else?
If that’s because these are very specific math algorithms, can anybody show more real/practice performance tests?
UPDATE: I’ve got the answers so far summarizing that Erlang is not the right tool for such specific “fast Java case”, but the thing that is unclear to me – what’s the main reason for such Erlang inefficiency here: dynamic typing, GC or poor native compiling?
Erlang was not built for math. It was built with communication, parallel processing and scalability in mind, so testing it for math tasks is a bit like testing if your jackhammer gives you refreshing massage experience.
That said, let’s offtop a little:
If you want Erlang-style programming in JVM, take a look at Scala Actors or Akka framework or Vert.x.