[erlang-questions] Maps

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 05/14/2013 05:43 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> To be perfectly honest I don't think that for most record uses this is going to be much of a problem. There's plenty of #state{} records in user applications that aren't accessed enough to make this significant.
>>
>> And if you wait 10 years, any performance difference will be insignificant...
>
> The frames proposal has been around for 10 years already.
> If I wait 10 years, it is quite likely that nothing will happen.

I would suggest not waiting, then.

> Machines are not getting faster these days, so I'm not sure why
> waiting would make the performance difference insignificant.

That's simply not true. Clock rate doesn't increase, but performance 
continues getting better. Core i7 CPUs (and Xeon equivalents) are a huge 
improvement over the previous generation, even for single-threaded 
operations.

>>> I would agree for key/value structures, but I fear that by including lists and non key/value tuples you're going to make this much too complex.
>
> Single mechanism.  ONE thing to understand.
> Proven technology: people using other languages with this approach
> don't seem to have any problem.

You don't say what language though, so I'm assuming it's obscure 
languages and the technology has only been proven with a small 
population, probably mostly academic.

The only thing Google returns me is Perl's Data::Deep which has a 
function applyPatch which is unreadable.

If there is a fool proof solution I'm all for it, but I can't really 
envision a readable universal syntax for something like this. (And this 
is the part where you say that nobody needs syntax, they only need 
functions, I assume.)

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
Erlang Cowboy
Nine Nines
http://ninenines.eu