Joe’s Blog!

In relation to a post on the Erlang mailing list here is a pretty interesting post over at Tenerife Skunkworks about the speed of setting and getting variables (specifically arrays, tuples etc) in Erlang. Interestingly tuples are much faster at ‘get’ than arrays and arrays are much faster at ’set’. To that end getting a tuple is multiple orders of magnitudes faster than setting it.

The tuple test pre-allocates a tuple of 10k or 100k elements. There’s no destructive assignment in Erlang and so the same large tuple needs to be allocated and discarded on every set operation. It’s very inefficient to allocate and discard a large tuple on every set operation, thus naive tuple set is very slow.

The array module uses an efficient tree-like internal representation…

Cool stuff.

I have shutdown musicsucks.net, it has been neglected in the recent months due to music blogging becoming more of a job (music reviews, going to shows, interviews and etc are surprisingly a lot of work) than a fun thing to do when I have time. Also as you might imagine I have plenty of other things to work on in the coming months so I cannot see myself (or Erin for that matter) keeping it up. Thanks for reading.

If you have been reading this blog lately you know that I have picked up an interest in Erlang. As such I have been on their email list. Recently there was a question of Erlounge meetup sorta stuff in Missouri since there wasn’t anything like that yet myself and another Erlang’er have decided to get things rolling with ErloungeSTL. The first meeting will be Sept 11th at 7pm at Contegix. If you are at all interested in functional languages, programming or Erlang you should show up and check it out. We will be having a couple presentations and should be remotely interesting for even someone that has never written a line of Erlang.

Erin and I are getting married! There will be a lot going on and tons of stuff we want to share in the next few months leading up to the big day, December 6th 2008. As such we have setup a blog to keep everyone informed and abreast of current marital and prenuptial events and information. Check it out at http://www.teamwilliams.info/ . More to come soon!