[erlang-questions] Binary pattern matching and optimization

[Robert Virding]

2008/11/24 Vance Shipley <vances@REDACTED>

> Robert,
>
> My thinking was that reading a big binary and then passing it
> with offsets to various parsing functions would be easier on
> the emulator than creating a new binary for each one.  Is it
> the case that the compiler will optimize away the creation of
> these binaries?
>

No, I don't think so. It optimises the following case:

foo(<< ... , Rest/binary>>, ... ) ->
    ...
    bar(Rest, ...);

The important thing is that the old reference to the binary is not used
again and can be reused by the compiler. If you have a big binary and want
to pass off chunks of it to different functions is a different problem. Then
it is probably better to pass the whole binary and an offset. However, doing
something like:

foo(Offset, Bin, ...) ->
    << _:Offset/binary, Stuff, _/binary>> = Bin,
    ...
    foo(Offset + N, Bin, ...)

and skipping over the beginning each time is most likely not the best way to
step over bits of your chunk. I would do something like:

foo(Offset, Bin, ...) ->
    << _:Offset/binary,TheGoodBit/binary >> = Bin,
    foo1(TheGoodBit, ...).

and foo1 as my first example above which picks bit off the head of the bin.

Robert
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