[nivertech]

Every suffiently large Erlang applications include parts written in C. In our case we do JSON parsing in C, we use ZeroMQ, etc.

When you need save memory and/or CPU when processing strings, you can use binaries, IO-lists and in some cases even atoms. The default string representation as linked-lists is good for 50% of applications, but you shouldn't use it when memory consumption or performance is matter.