A high performance Erlang system

Abstract

Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language designed to ease the development of large-scale distributed soft real-time control applications. It has so far been quite successful in this application domain, despite the fact that its currently available implementations are emulators of virtual machines. In this paper, we improve on the performance aspects of Erlang implementations by presenting HiPE, an open-source native code compiler for Erlang. HiPE is a complete implementation of Erlang, offers flexible integration between emulated and native code, and efficiently supports features crucial for Erlang's application domain such as concurrency. As our performance evaluations show, HiPE is currently the fastest among all Erlang implementations.