This is not a interpretation issue per-say, because .exs files are also interpreted, but more of a performance problem of the VM when starting up.
From my understanding the penalty comes from the fact that application supervision tree starts all processes synchronously, this is a great feature for developers, because you don’t have to think about race conditions, but the price is performance.
At the same time I might be wrong and it is just something that will be fixed in the future, currently it doesn’t have a wide impact because most of the elixir applications work as long-running daemons.
