Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#1

Post by jaydub » Thu, Dec 25, 2008, 7:52 PM UTC

Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark
muharem.wordpress.com

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#2

Post by rw » Thu, Dec 25, 2008, 11:37 PM UTC

Article is from Summer 2007.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#3

Post by unrealwh » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 12:15 AM UTC

not surprising that python is competitive...afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading benchmarks (supposedly the core strength of erlang).

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#4

Post by newt0311 » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 12:24 AM UTC

Nice article. Anybody want to try this with the new CPython multiprocess module?

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#5

Post by tdavis » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 1:22 AM UTC

I don't think Stackless is nearly as well-known as it should be. It has a solid value proposition and is blazing fast in my experience as well.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#6

Post by amix » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 1:29 AM UTC

For most things language performance is just a constant - the really hard issue is making something distributed and it's really here that Erlang shines. Being a Python programmer I know that creating a distributed application in Python is far from simple - while it's almost a trivial task in Erlang.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#7

Post by graemep » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 4:40 AM UTC

amix wrote: post #6

For most things language performance is just a constant - the really hard issue is making something distributed and it's really here that Erlang shines. Being a Python programmer I know that creating a distributed application in Python is far from simple - while it's almost a trivial task in Erlang.

I was wondering about this. Is it really comparing like with like? I do not know Erlang, but I thought it had a lot of overhead from being designed for distributed apps etc.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#8

Post by shutter » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 5:30 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #7

amix wrote: post #6

For most things language performance is just a constant - the really hard issue is making something distributed and it's really here that Erlang shines. Being a Python programmer I know that creating a distributed application in Python is far from simple - while it's almost a trivial task in Erlang.

I was wondering about this. Is it really comparing like with like? I do not know Erlang, but I thought it had a lot of overhead from being designed for distributed apps etc.

A better comparison would be with Multiprocessing, or Eventlet/Spawning.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#9

Post by jbjohns » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 10:28 AM UTC

unrealwh wrote: post #3

not surprising that python is competitive...afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading benchmarks (supposedly the core strength of erlang).

Have a link for this? But lightweight threading isn't all that Erlang brings to the table. It comes with an entire library designed to create extremely fault tolerant, live-upgradable, extremely concurrent systems.

Getting lightweight threading of the same speed or faster is good, but it's less than 1/3 of the equation.

Re: Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark

#10

Post by bitdiddle » Fri, Dec 26, 2008, 1:47 PM UTC

It's certainly important to know where Erlang doesn't perform so well. Project Euler ( http://projecteuler.net/ ) is also good for exploring the strengths of a given lanaguage. In terms of building robust and scalable distributed systems it cannot be touched. This stems for it's motivating use case of telephony. I'm not sure about Python but I know Haskell has been used largely in academic circles and hasn't had the same amount of attention paid to robustness. Joe Armstrong wrote a very good paper on the history of Erlang's development ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2811 ).