[erlang-questions] VM & BEAM Specs : idea for improving thelists support

[David Mercer]

This has been an interesting thread.  Thanks!  Question below...

On Monday, August 06, 2007 01:41 ok wrote:
> > The benefit is again in both performance and memory consumption.
> > Imagine that a program has consumes a large text document with  
> > English,
> > Arabic and Russian characters. The current implementation will  
> > consume 4
> > times more memory than an automatically-typed vector-based version. In
> > case the document contains only ASCII characters, the memory  
> > consumption
> > will drop 8 times.
> 
> Only if someone is daft enough to store the whole thing as a simple list
> of characters.  There are much better ways, in the language and using  
> the
> implementation that we now have.

For newbies among us, are you referring to storing it as a binary, or
something else?

Thanks.

Cheers,

David