The BEAM was originally designed to run software for telephone switches. It's often referred to as soft realtime because it is so responsive. It has been battle-tested for now over 3 decades.
Where the BEAM falls flat is pure number crunching but it's blazing fast with binary processing (e.g. string parsing).
A fresh phoenix project where you render a nontrivial template easily reaches sub millisecond response times, without any kind of optimization.
That being said, I agree that performance for certain IO intensive applications like web servers is very good, way better than Ruby. Subjectively Phoenix feels way, way faster than Rails in development and is much more performant in production.
Yeah, but how many companies do you know of that perform heavy computations in such large scale that their choice of programming language has a noticeable effect on the result?
I mean, it might matter for tech giants like Google, who need to squeeze every bit of processing power out of their CPUs. For almost everyone else, it will be a non-issue.
Going from Phoenix to Rocket.rs I saw a pretty dramatic speedup on even simple pages. Phoenix was faster than the Rails version of the app, but still slower than a compiled language.
Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
From the sound of it things have gotten better (by throwing out oft-touted features), but Elixir deployments are inherently far too complicated. With Go and Rust you get a single binary and a single program to run. With Java (and other languages targeting the JVM) you get a single jar archive. With Elixir you get to bundle the whole runtime and spawn a few separate supervisor processes to run even a hello world app. Lord help you if the only maintainer for the deployment tooling takes an unannounced vacation or if the various BEAM processes stop talking to each other because the stars are misaligned (and the deployment tools are minimally tested) and you can't even run an Elixir based database migration as a result.
When I started toying around with Elixir and Phoenix I'd just come off of a Clojure kick. You can get most, if not all, of the syntactical sugar that Elixir promises with other languages that all offer infinitely simpler deployments with more mature tooling. In the case of Clojure you get whatever JVM tooling you'd like.
First, discerning the compilation step to IR is relevant, which is why for example, Python can be compiled or interpreted. That distinction matters. Even though it is compiled to intermediate representation, it is still compiled.
Now, with regards to the intermediate representation, Java Byte Code is also not interpreted. Java Byte Code is compiled to native machine code either Just in Time by the JVM, or Ahead of Time by the SubstrateVM. Both of these make it a compiled language.
An interpreted language never gets translated into native machine code, it gets executed by a native interpreter, and that's very different. It is more akin to using a language where you read and parse texts, and based on the text, you might execute one or more things. Now if that parsing to execution branching is powerful enough to allow Turing complete behavior, you have yourself a full blown interpreted computer language. This is not what happens in the JVM. The JVM translates Java Byte Code to native machine code Just in Time, and then the native code is run.
Regardless, interpreted does not mean bad, or poor performance for your task.
It’s a technical notion.
Most people would say Python is interpreted, even if you are only running compile python bytecode on a JIT like PyPy. That’s exactly the same situation as Java.
GCJ, for instance, allows AOT compilation of a Java program that requires no JVM.
This makes Java a compiled language, even though it is compiled to machine code for a machine that doesn't exist. Java Byte Code is an assembly language, and in fact, Sun had at one point machines that were natively using Java Byte Code instruction sets.
Now Java Byte Code is trickier. You could consider it to be interpreted or compiled or both. It is fair to say that in general it is interpreted, but it is just as fair to say it is in general compiled.
What matters most though is to understand that modern JVMs make use of a JIT compiler and optional AOT compilers.
In the latter mode, you can compile Java Byte Code to native machine executables ahead of time or pre-runtime and no JVM beyond that point is required. So you can distribute the app as a self-contained executable. In most cases though, this will be less performant in the average and peak performance, but it will speed up the worst case, such as start time.
In the former mode, the JVM will analyze runtime behavior and based on the frequency of use of various code paths, it will either compile the code to native machine code (cache the compiled code), and then run the freshly compiled code block, or it will choose to interpret the byte code directly. This allows aggressive optimization from information which is only available or easily available at runtime when performing compilation.
Actual sourced-based interpretation is _very_ slow, and pretty rare in anything that sees meaningful real world use. Ruby was, back when it was an order of magnitude slower than Python, but no other example jumps readily to mind, and Ruby went bytecode with the release of 1.9 in 2007.
> Python is an interpreted language, as opposed to a compiled one, though the distinction can be blurry because of the presence of the bytecode compiler. This means that source files can be run directly without explicitly creating an executable which is then run.
OpenJDK can't do that. You need to pre-compile the source to byte code first.
Hotspot includes an interpreter -- your code may be interpreted until it gets hot and gets compiled.
Still, I don't think it's fair to call Java an interpreted language since the parts that are interpreted are only during warm up or slow enough not to matter.
Java on the other hand is 100% compiled (to bytecode). And byte code is machine code for a non existent machine. Actually, I think Sun had built machines that could natively execute Java Byte Code. Someone could build an interpreter for it, but I'm not aware of one.