Primelix
This project's major goal is to benchmark the runtime overhead of the BEAM. It also is meant as a testbed for experimenting with the BEAM Port system.
+------+
| BEAM |---[Port A]---> [External Process A]
| |
| |---[Port B]---> [External Process B]
+------+
The BEAM Port system offers a fault-tolerant interface to functionality that is written in another language. A BEAM-internal Process can monitor the external one and restart it when necessary.
But foreign-code interfacing always comes with a cost. Because converting data from and to the external process can be expensive. To make the benchmark representative I have created it to be end-to-end; i.e.: from the BEAM to the external process and back again.
Caveat Emptor
If have used the calculation of prime numbers as a cpu bound task that can be easily implemented in other languages and frameworks. Beware: the implementation might be a bit naive. Especially the conversion can be improved by switching to a pure binary format; I'm curious whether this will change the results significantly.
Seeing for yourself
I have published it here for comparison and so you can recreate it on your
machine. I have used Elixir 1.8.1 on Erlang 21.3.2 but it might run on older
Versions. Your mileage may vary. You should have installed the Mix Toolchain
together with your Elixir version. Mix is required for conveniently building and
running this experiment.
To compile all sources you need a gcc + make and rust + cargo toolchain
installed. I have used rustc and cargo in version 1.35.0 and gcc in
version 8.2.1 with GNU make in version 4.2.1. You can try to compile all
the sources with older versions than the mentioned ones, but I cannot give any
assumptions regarding your success.
If all the prerequisites are met you can run the benchmark using mix benchmark.
This is an alias that will execute the following Mix tasks (in that order):
mix deps.get # installs the Elixir dependencies
mix compile # compiles the Elixir sources
mix cprimes # compiles the C implementation
mix rustyprimes # compiles the Rust implementation
mix run benchmark.exs # runs the benchmark and prints results
License
This project is published under the The 3-Clause BSD License. See LICENSE.md
for details.