[SenorWilson]

> The author mentions how he thinks representing all strings as linked lists is the 'right thing to do

I think the author just likes that the runtime for string concatenation is fast; not sure why he ignores the fact that you'd need to chase pointers for every other string op.

He then goes on to talk about openCL and how he can use his erlang code to use the benefits of the openCL compiler, but of the 25 years of using this language, he's only had this benefit for a couple of years.

Sounds wacky to me.

[jlouis]

Remember that Erlang is a functional language with a persistent heap. You often create your concatenation only once and if you need to process strings, you process your strings in another, symbolic, representation.

Thus the raw string-processing speed isn't important in usual programs. The iolist() primitive is there to make it fast to just gather up data that has to go over a socket and essentially writev() it to the socket (guess what happens internally in the VM...)

So it is usually not the case you pay the pointer chasing in typical Erlang programs.