Yeah, I was wondering that. There could always be the general overhead in the VM, but the HIPE version (which is compiled IIRC) should be closer. A commenter mentioned that the erlang version would be creating intermediate lists that would have to be garbage collected (see all the lists:seq(0, Div-1) ), but I wouldn&#x27;t know how to avoid that without writing unidiomatic code. I&#x27;m no erlang expert though.