[erlang-questions] Atom Unicode Support

[Björn Gustavsson]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 3:13 PM, José Valim
<jose.valim@REDACTED> wrote:

> 3. Introduce a new chunk called AtoE (Atoms with Encoding) to *replace* the
> existing Atom chunk. It will be quite similar to the current Atom chunk
> except we will also include the encoding alongside each atom size and
> contents. The Atom chunk will only be loaded if there is no AtoE chunk. If
> we choose this option, we can also choose to always emit the new chunk or
> emit the AtoE chunk only if there are Unicode atoms.
>
> 4. Similar to option 3) except that we introduce a new Atom chunk that will
> keep all atoms but always in Unicode. Since the runtime translates them to
> latin1 later anyway, this is an option if we don't want to store the
> encoding in the table.

I prefer 4 because it is the simplest. For most modules, the
chunk will be smaller than for option 3.

> Thank you!
>
> PS: If you'd prefer this conversation to be moved off the list, please let
> me know.

Unless the list minds, I think that it is better to keep the
conversation on the list so that other can benefit from it.
Personally, I have learned a lot from following conversations
about design decisions on other mailing lists (for example,
the Git mailing list).

/Björn

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB