small optimization story

[James Hague]

>Thank goodness someone who knows Erlang has done a
>little work on those Language Shootout benchmarks.

They're a funny set of programs, geared toward very static problems, 
but fiddling with them in Erlang is still fun.  It's impressive that 
Erlang walks all over Python and Ruby in most cases, often being over 
twice as fast.  Who says Erlang isn't a fast sequential language!

>If I remember correctly, the main problem for Erlang
>with the Win32 Shootout is redirected file input from
>a windows command line - that makes Erlang fail 8 of
>the benchmarks.

It scores poorly on those benchmarks in Doug's original Linux 
shootout, too.  In each case, you have to read a file a line at a 
time, which is not something that Erlang excels at.  If you could 
slurp in the entire file at once via file:read/1, then no problem, 
but line-oriented input is a dog.

James