I’ve been out of the Erlang world for a few years now, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for serverless. The VM has a non-trivial overhead, and the language (and VM) design is optimized for long-running, high availability services.
I would say it's mostly that nobody optimized it (perhaps yet) for that environment. There's generally nothing inherently slow in the VM boot sequence - it's just that this was not a priority, so it's slow. There are some attributes suggesting it could be a good fit for that environment, for example, the VM is generally very small - you can get a full system in ~20MB - and that again wasn't something that was heavily optimized.
The VM has an overhead, but looking at our kube cluster right now which runs elixir and ruby pods (treating elixir as shared nothing, old school stateless, rather than distributed), mean RAM for our ruby pods is 1GB, Ex ones are 200MB. Response times: Ex: ~30ms, Ruby: ~150ms.
Sounds about right. With wasm being relevant for edge computing and serverless I'm keeping a close eye on the Lumen project compiler as I expect that to be more feasible for this sort of work. The advantages for OTP remain mostly in long-running services. But for Lumen that might be a more open question.
