[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.