Erlang Efficiency quesitons

[James Hague]

> > These days with the rise of XML, efficient string support 
> will become
> > much more critical.
> > 
> 
> Yup,

Eight bytes per character bugs me as much as anyone, but in all honesty is
string processing in Erlang really blindingly slow compared to other
languages? For simple filters, Perl walks all over Erlang, but for parsing
and such I'm not sure. Even if Erlang is a bit below average in the string
processing department, the performance of the rest of the language is better
than any interpreted language I have used. Heck, even in toy benchmarks it
walks all over some compiled Lisps.  And as it stands, Erlang doesn't
involve issues about 8 vs 16 bit characters.

It would be trivial to justuse  binaries instead of strings as it is, I
think.  I rewrote a custom lexer to use binaries instead of lists, and it
ended up much cleaner.

James