[erlang-questions] Not an Erlang fan

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Chris Wong <chris@REDACTED> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 23, 2007, at 10:20 AM, Thomas Lindgren wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Ruby is known to be very slow.  REXML is a pure Ruby
> XML parser. It's  
> the slowest XML parser I've ever used.
> 
> You've set the bar too low for xmerl to pass. :-) 
> Now, if xmerl  
> beats a C XML parser, I'd be impressed. :-)

Oh yeah :-) 

But just to be clear: my point is not that xmerl is
beating highly optimized parsers written in portable
assembly language nor that REXML is the gold standard
of Ruby XML parsing, but that one shouldn't jump to
conclusions based on simple examples. 

I think Erlang and xmerl are not world-beaters but
pretty competitive in this instance, and that it's
thus premature to say parsing or file processing in
Erlang is inherently slow. (As far as I can tell, Tim
Bray doesn't say that either.) I'll grant that getting
there can be much messier than with scripting
languages because there is less support for those
kinds of operations.

Best,
Thomas



       
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