Comment by phoe-krk

Numerical computation is not and never was a priority for the BEAM. Reliability, network connectivity and efficiency for multiple processes were.

If you want to leverage highly performant numerical code, I suggest to link against a native C library from BEAM using NIFs via http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/nif.html or connect a C program to the Erlang network via http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/cnode.html