From a numerics standpoint, both Elixir and Erlang have some issues. One of the annoying ones is that there isn't the concept of NaNs like you'd expect--it will actually throw an error if you divide by zero. For certain applications, this is annoying.
Further, there isn't really any hope (right now) of accessing hardware SIMD due to the way that the Erlang VM handles its numbers. Lists are cons-cell lists, tuples are arrays of bundled atoms, and neither will give you numbers in adjacent memory slots.
I toyed with the idea of using bitstrings and storing "raw" vectors in NIFs, but it feels so clunky to do that and then have to marshal into and out of native code all the time.
All of that said, it's downright pretty how you can write some of your tests.
Source: I've written a vector math library for Elixir.
Further, there isn't really any hope (right now) of accessing hardware SIMD due to the way that the Erlang VM handles its numbers. Lists are cons-cell lists, tuples are arrays of bundled atoms, and neither will give you numbers in adjacent memory slots.
I toyed with the idea of using bitstrings and storing "raw" vectors in NIFs, but it feels so clunky to do that and then have to marshal into and out of native code all the time.
All of that said, it's downright pretty how you can write some of your tests.
Source: I've written a vector math library for Elixir.