Pitiful benchmark performance

[James Hague]

(I hit "send" by accident.  Apologies.)

> I've been browsing the Doug Bagley Shootout pages:
> http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ and Erlang does 
> spectacularly badly in
> quite a few areas where it shouldn't really be quite that bad.

Some of the benchmarks are pretty convoluted in Erlang.  I'm thinking
specifically of one of the Hash benchmarks, which does a lot of conversion
between lists and atoms inside an inner loop.  To wit:

doinserts1(10000, _) -> ok;
doinserts1(I, H) ->
    Key = list_to_atom(lists:append(
        "foo_", integer_to_list(I))),
    ets:insert(H, { Key, I }),
    doinserts1(I+1, H).

This is much more than a test of hashing.

James