Elixir vs. Java vs. Lua vs. WebAssembly Comparison Chart

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Elixir is successfully used in web development, embedded software, data ingestion, and multimedia processing, across a wide range of industries. Check our getting started guide and our learning page to begin your journey with Elixir. All Elixir code runs inside lightweight threads of execution (called processes) that are isolated and exchange information via messages. Due to their lightweight nature, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of processes running concurrently in the same machine. Isolation allows processes to be garbage collected independently, reducing system-wide pauses, and using all machine resources as efficiently as possible (vertical scaling). Processes are also able to communicate with other processes running on different machines in the same network.

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.