While benchmarking Go vs Elixir vs Node, we discovered that Elixir (running on the BEAM virtual machine) had much higher CPU usage than Go, and yet its responsiveness remained excellent. Some of our readers suggested that busy waiting may be responsible for this behavior. Turns out, busy waiting in BEAM is an optimization that ensures maximum responsiveness. In essence, when waiting for a certain event, the virtual machine first enters a CPU-intensive tight loop, where it continuously checks to ...