The performance work in Erlang at the moment is really exciting. It's easy to get sniffy about it and say the JVM/CLR/whatever has has JITing for years. True. But then performance has never been the Erlang standout: that would be concurrency and robustness.<p>The JIT is bringing BEAM languages up the rankings on performance. It may have a way to go to get to JVM level, and might not ever get there. But it's on a really encouraging trajectory.<p>And none of that compromises the concurrency and robustness story, where it still stands at the forefront of production-quality capability with a single, well-designed approach that's well-implemented and impressively scalable.<p>The care that has gone into Erlang's evolution (including the BEAM VM) is nicely illustrated by this para in the blog:<p>> The embedded type information is versioned so that we can continue to improve the type-based optimizations in every OTP release. The loader will ignore versions it does not recognize so that the module can still be loaded without the type-based optimizations.<p>I'm not claiming that's unique among VMs (don't know, probably not) but it does nicely illustrate diligence on the part of the core team.<p>With Elixir adding some sparkle as an alternative BEAM language, it's a great time to be part of the Erlang community. Chapeau to the core team and community.
every other week there's a post about JIT, LLVM, etc. (either like this or more commonly in Python where people show it improving 5x or whatever)<p>whenever I see it, it makes me feel like Julia-lang really did a good job picking the approach and technology all the way back in 2010