[erlang-questions] '--' BIF to be used with caution?

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 11 Feb 2009, at 9:58 pm, Hynek Vychodil wrote:
> Nice, and now measure this for 5 element long lists.

Who *cares*?  For teeny tiny lists, they are all too fast
to measure reliably, which means that for teeny tiny lists
there is no point in keeping the C code.


Anyone remember UNIX V7 for PDP-11?
The designers had pretty much done "the simplest thing that
could possibly work".  Time and again, faced with the need
for a data structure, they had done their calculations and
found that on a PDP-11 the data structures just couldn't
get big enough for linear searches to be a problem.

Then the code got ported to the VAX, and performance was
*horrible*, because on a VAX the data structures *could*
get that big.