Stackless is missing some important parts. I've spent a great deal of time working with it over the past few months, and there's no good SSL socket support. The built-in socket module will block the entire process (all tasklets), and while drop-in replacements exist, they either don't work with SSL, are buggy, or both.
Stackless also lacks Erlang's transparent support for multi-process and multi-machine execution, though I talked to a guy who's working on adding that for his Master's degree.
I'll be the first to admit that http socket issues exist and drop-in replacements are indeed often buggy. That being said, this wouldn't be a huge issue to overcome were Stackless given more TLC. Regardless, it has many other valuable uses.
For most things language performance is just a constant - the really hard issue is making something distributed and it's really here that Erlang shines. Being a Python programmer I know that creating a distributed application in Python is far from simple - while it's almost a trivial task in Erlang.
I was wondering about this. Is it really comparing like with like? I do not know Erlang, but I thought it had a lot of overhead from being designed for distributed apps etc.
It's certainly important to know where Erlang doesn't perform so well. Project Euler ( http://projecteuler.net/ ) is also good for exploring the strengths of a given lanaguage. In terms of building robust and scalable distributed systems it cannot be touched. This stems for it's motivating use case of telephony. I'm not sure about Python but I know Haskell has been used largely in academic circles and hasn't had the same amount of attention paid to robustness. Joe Armstrong wrote a very good paper on the history of Erlang's development ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2811 ).
as was already pointed out, this isn't a very accurate benchmark; it wasn't tested on a multi-core/processor machine, nor more importantly was it tested on a cluster of machines.
not surprising that python is competitive...afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading benchmarks (supposedly the core strength of erlang).
Have a link for this? But lightweight threading isn't all that Erlang brings to the table. It comes with an entire library designed to create extremely fault tolerant, live-upgradable, extremely concurrent systems.
Getting lightweight threading of the same speed or faster is good, but it's less than 1/3 of the equation.
