A good way to think about Elixir: instead of optimizing for bare metal performance and assembly code with a clunky process and thread API, you optimize for an elegant process and thread API then let the battle-hardened BEAM handle the bare metal performance (it is excellent at this). The magic (pun intended) of Elixir is that by thinking of concurrency first and processors second, your code is naturally structured in a way that makes applications Just Work in our massive distributed world.