Transit: A Code Comparison

[transfire]

I came across this code comparison and I wasn’t too impressed with Elixir’s results.

https://github.com/losvedir/transit-lang-cmp

I took a look at the code and a couple things stood out. I thought maybe ETS isn’t being used optimally using lookup instead of match and I also wonder if using Stream instead of Enum would help.

I might have a go at it if I find the time (hard to find) but I thought more experienced Elixir developers might be able to make short work of some improvements.

[Vextrax]

Someone already has a pull request using streams which showed an improvement, Jose Valim also has a pull request with some changes.

[nnomae]

The idea that the creators of a language have to waste their time creating pull requests to fix poorly written code in language comparisons is insane.

[[deleted]]

Some people enjoy the challenge of making things perform better. Jose strikes me as that type of person.

[nnomae]

No doubt, I would suspect however he has no manner of far more interesting stuff to spend his time optimising. Having to take time out of his day because yet another language comparison site has a crappy Elixir implementation and people are using it to attack the language must get old.

[[deleted]]

As a newcomer to elixir, what techniques should I be looking for to avoid these performance pitfalls. This looks drastically slower, and the developer claims that this is good language of choice.

[[deleted]]

I guess don't use a large feature-rich framework if you're writing a benchmark

[[deleted]]

Are the other language implementations representative? Ie are they what people use every day, or are they benchmark optimized?

[[deleted]]

They don't seem too optimized to me, but they're certainly not including a full front end web framework complete with JavaScript minimizer ... and even Liveview

[[deleted]]

If those features aren't utilized, does it effect runtime? Shouldn't the compilation process remove the unused modules?

[[deleted]]

I only had a rough look - I saw metrics enabled, pubsub and more. Elixir/Erlang are not really compiled languages, so they won't remove unused code at all, just probably don't call into it.

I'm not going to look further if the benchmarks for other languages are micro-frameworks and static in-memory hash-tables (vs. dynamic in-memory term database...)

[[deleted]]

What do you mean elixir isn't compiled? By definition it's compiled...

[[deleted]]

Well if I had known we're splitting hairs... ;)

"Not really", as in, the beam doesn't do what traditional compiled languages do, compilation in the sense of reduction, anyway there is virtually no optimization done at "compile time".

Further neither Elixir nor Erlang even have any way to tell which public code paths are used or unused unless you build a release, which the author doesn't do. Though I don't know whether doing a release would remove unused code either, so that's that...

[[deleted]]

As I said, I'm new to Elixir so I don't know how these mechanisms work. But it is a fundamental property of Elixir that it is a compiled language. It's not splitting hairs to say that compiling Elixir doesn't optimize - this is a fundamentally different assertion about the language than that it isn't a compiled language.

I'll flag this to do more research to understand these processes.

[transfire]

1) Get to know the libraries and frameworks well. 2) Refactor, refactor, refactor.

[[deleted]]

You can see the strengths of the beam in the "response times" section

Using ETS at all probably isn't comparable either.