[erlang-questions] decode_packet and the philosophy of BIFs

[James Hague]

I recently wrote my own HTTP header decoder, which was a fun exercise.
 Then I realized that the erlang:decode_packet BIF does much the same
thing, only it's in C and probably a lot faster (although my code does
parsing of key/value pairs in URLs and some other things).

On this mailing list, there's been some objection to adding too many
BIFs, especially ones that are over-specialized, so decode_packet is a
peculiar case.  It's misnamed: it decodes HTTP packets, yet HTTP isn't
mentioned in the name.  It's one of the most complex BIFs, in that it
encapsulates parsing an entire text-based format, and it takes ~20
lines of type specifiers to describe the return value.  I'm sure
there's an interesting story about how decode_packet managed to get
into Erlang, especially as some other potential BIFs (like scanning
binaries) haven't made it past the discussion stage.