ICFP 2005 conference

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Jay Nelson <jay@REDACTED> wrote:

> I wrote an article for this year's conference in
> Tallin.  Unfortunately, 
> I was not able to attend the conference and make the
> presentation.  The 
> topic was "A Stream Library using Erlang Binaries".
> 
> The article should be posted soon on the erlang
> website, but it is also 
> available along with the briefing I intended to give
> at 
> http://www.duomark.com/erlang/
> 
> Comments, critiques and contributions are welcome.

I found the paper very interesting -- in essence, a
"global" approach to working with binaries (by using
BIFs on 'bulk' binaries), rather than the "local"
approach of bit syntax. It didn't hurt that the
performance results were fairly impressive either.
There were some rough edges to some details, but I
think those can be smoothed out.

Ideally, there should be some way to compile bit
syntax into these sorts of BIFs. The bit syntax
notation still is far more pleasant to use than BIF
calls, and probably more flexible too. (Which is
really a risk: if the compiler can't map to fast BIFs,
there may be inexplicable performance drops, which can
be quite annoying. But I digress.)

At the same session at the workshop, the Hipe group
presented a paper on bit-aligned binaries. For some
algorithms, such as compression/decompression, this
seems useful indeed; likewise, some of the messier
protocols may suddenly become more pleasant to
implement.

Maybe the two can be combined somehow?

Best,
Thomas



		
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