[erlang-questions] '--' BIF to be used with caution?

[Hynek Vychodil]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:

>
> On 11 Feb 2009, at 9:58 pm, Hynek Vychodil wrote:
>
>> Nice, and now measure this for 5 element long lists.
>>
>
> Who *cares*?  For teeny tiny lists, they are all too fast
> to measure reliably, which means that for teeny tiny lists
> there is no point in keeping the C code.


Hundreds hares are wolf's death. Keep in mind that Erlang systems is
supposed to be soft real time in some application. There is latency matter
in those applications. If in one task you have to do hundreds of '--'
operations even with short lists you need do it in ns or us times and BIF is
worth solution there.

>
>
>
> Anyone remember UNIX V7 for PDP-11?
> The designers had pretty much done "the simplest thing that
> could possibly work".  Time and again, faced with the need
> for a data structure, they had done their calculations and
> found that on a PDP-11 the data structures just couldn't
> get big enough for linear searches to be a problem.
>
> Then the code got ported to the VAX, and performance was
> *horrible*, because on a VAX the data structures *could*
> get that big.
>
>


-- 
--Hynek (Pichi) Vychodil

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