[erlang-questions] Not an Erlang fan

[dda]

But what he is parsing here is plain text, not XML -- and his
complaints are about i/o and regexes, which are indeed slow. However I
think that he's mocking some of Erlang best features without really
using them, and I think we should prove him -- he asks for it after
all! -- that Erlang can do the job, and that if he can't wrap his old
Perl brain around it, not our fault...

-- 
Didier

On 9/24/07, Thomas Lindgren <thomasl_erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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