Erlang is much slower in raw performance than both go and jvm: https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/erlang.html
Async approache similar to Erlang was reproduced for Java and Go already: https://akka.io
It'd be great if there were better benchmarks for common use cases of various languages. Spring on the Java side tends to be heavy on reflection usage, which is orders of magnitude slower than JIT'ed JVM methods. Benchmarks like the benchmark game don't capture this. Still despite that the Erlang VM performs very well on the benchmarks game compared to other dynamic/scripting languages. Often it's easily 5-10 times faster than Python or Ruby. Given the parents comment, I'd argue many programmers who enjoy developing with dynamic languages can do so with Elixir with comparable performance to Go/Java for high concurrency web applications.
Somebody should make those.
(People may have different ideas about which use cases are common).
As you can see, erlang is far from the top there.
However it gets more interesting if you look at the Latency tab. There Phoenix comes in with an average of 7.9 ms. In comparison Gin averages 5.8 ms, Spring at 12.1 ms, Flask Py3 at 23.1 or Py2 at 14.7 ms.
Where it's really interesting is looking at the max latency. Presuming this indicates roughly how 99th and 95th percentiles measurements would compare. In this category Phoenix comes in second with a max of 22.0 ms, behind only lib-mongodb at 20.8 ms. The lib-Mongolia is one of the fastest frameworks by raw req/s.
Appreciate the link to the benchmarks! Much more interesting, especially if you're concerned about max latency (and likely 99/95 th percentiles). In this case BEAM/Phoenix would let you plan capacity to minimize max latency fairly well as it appears very consistent.
But raw java servlets delivered 100+k req/s. It may mean that all this event loop/async/actors hype is overrated, and regular blocking approach can also deliver.
… and "Most (all?) large systems developed using Erlang make heavy use of C for low-level code, leaving Erlang to manage the parts which tend to be complex in other languages, like controlling systems spread across several machines and implementing complex protocol logic."
FAQ 1.4 What sort of problems is Erlang not particularly suitable for?
But it also has native coroutines embedded into language, which provide excellent asynchronous performance.