How is the performance of Elixir for blockchain apps?

[Skysoft13]

I am try to learning elixir since 5 month, and I had a project in golang for mobile back-end for blockchain app, it had amazing performance, I am just curious about performance of elixir for blockchain apps, any idea?

[victorbjorklund]

Probably helps if you expand a bit what the blockchain app is (which helps understand where bottlenecks are). Its a very broad category from exchanges (where every ms matters) to web3 nft apps etc.

[Skysoft13]

any kind of blockchain apps I mean.

[mindok]

As @victorbjorklund says, it depends on what you are after. Elixir performance characteristics are pretty well documented in these forums. Examples include:

Understanding Elixir/Phoenix performance

Yes, but please also not that it is generally faster than perl/python/ruby even for computational tasks. It is slow in comparison to C/Java/Go/Rust type of languages. The “erlang/elixir is slow” quote is thrown around so much that people have started believing it is slow in comparison to any language which is not true. I don’t believe this is true. If you look at https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fast.html for example erlang comes in somewhere in …

Understanding Elixir/Phoenix performance

Doing file traversals is generally not going to be as efficient in Elixir/Erlang as in other languages. I will explain why. When you call File.open/2 in Elixir, it doesn’t return a file handler. It returns a process (a lightweight thread of execution) that contains the file handler. But the file handler itself is not even a direct file handler, as you would get in C, but it is an instance of a linkedin driver, which is a piece of code that runs isolated in the VM, that then talks to the file h…

Elixir language potential evaluation (comparison with go)

Elixir is not great at heavy duty number-crunching (although, depending on what you are doing, Elixir-Nx is addressing that).

However, for things like web-apps, the templating system and process model make for very efficient, performant web-apps that stay predictably responsive under load - e.g. no “stop-the-world” garbage collection.

“Blockchain apps” is a very broad set of possible applications with wildly different performance requirements so I don’t think you’re going to get a better answer without being more specific.

[kokolegorille]

This book might interest You…

Hands-on Elixir & OTP: Cryptocurrency Trading Bot (self-published)

[Jul19::213412] Hands-on Elixir & OTP: Cryptocurrency Trading Bot by Kamil Skowron Want to learn Elixir & OTP by creating a real-world project? With “Hands-on Elixir & OTP: Cryptocurrency trading bot”, you will gain hands-on experience by writing an exciting software project from scratch. We will explore all the key abstractions and essential principles through iterative implementation improvements. We will start by creating a new umbrella application, subscribing to WebSocket streams, im…

[Skysoft13]

@victorbjorklund @mindok @kokolegorille if you have app like dropbox and u keep data like images, videos, pdf…etc in blockchain, elixir or golang which one will be best for back-end services?

[dimitarvp]

Any workload that’s I/O bound makes the used programming language almost irrelevant. Simply because I/O is the CPU waiting on periphery e.g. network and file operations.

Does it really matter if your processing code finishes in 5 or 5000 microseconds if the I/O operation inside the same function takes 250_000 microseconds? No, it doesn’t.

So your evaluation of the used programming language for this task should ask other questions like: do you need strong static typing so you can predict all errors in advance (Rust, Haskell, OCaml / F#), do you just want to work with something familiar (for many that’s Python or JavaScript), do you need a language with excellent error-handling runtime (Erlang/Elixir), how good is the community library coverage of the thing you want to do (for most people that is the ultimate deciding factor btw), and maybe others.

Only you can answer those questions. But generally, if a lot of I/O is involved, most languages are adequate, Elixir included.