Interesting result of performance with string ++ vs prepend to list of string to append a list of string

[Kaiduan Xie]

Hi, all,

For a common operation like appending a list of string to get a new
string, I tried two ways, simple ++, add the string to the head of a
list of string and then reverse as below,

L1 = "Welcome to erlang land\r\n",
L2 = "Welcome to Canada\r\n",

1) L = L1 ++ L2.

2) R1 = [L1];
    R2 = [L2  | R1];
    lists:reverse(R2)

I expect 2) would be faster than 1) because everyone is talking ++ is
slow. However, the test result shows 2) is even faster than 1).

12> test:test_string_contact(1000000).
string++ time: 0.031/0.031 micro-seconds (runtime/wallclock)
ok
13> test:test_list_contact(1000000).
list contact time: 0.125/0.124 micro-seconds (runtime/wallclock)

Any idea why?

Thanks,

Kaiduan
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