[erlang-questions] Not an Erlang fan

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Keith Irwin <keith.irwin@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 9/23/07, Alex Alvarez <eajam@REDACTED> wrote:
> >
> > He definitely seems kind of bias at different
> points, but still it would
> > be great to find out where he went wrong!
> >
> 
> Isn't it that he's basing his whole analysis on file
> io, what's more, a
> single file which doesn't lend itself to
> parallelism?  Had he started by
> writing a client/server or p2p application around
> some domain other than
> system-admin stuff, perhaps he'd be much more
> favorable towards the
> multitude of strengths Erlang has to offer.

He's also using the obvious, tempting but very slow
io:read_line. Reading the entire file into a binary
takes 7 ms (sic) using file:read_file, not 34 seconds
using io:read_line as he reports. For a beginner it's
not obvious what to use, though, so life could be
easier.

My own experience with parsing XML in Erlang vs Ruby
is that xmerl parsing about 4 MB of XML handily beat
"the obvious" Ruby library the other guy used
(REXML?), being 10+ times faster or more -- xmerl
needed 10 seconds versus "a few minutes" for Ruby. So
I wouldn't say Erlang is inherently slow w.r.t.
parsing, but again, one may need some experience to
get it right.

Best,
Thomas



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