I would suggest that this topic is moved over to a github issue by those that are interested/participating.
I have observed a highly useful pattern of communication over the last year on this list: someone brings up a topic that relates to a design question/improvement of julia, there is a bit of discussion on the mailing list, but once the discussion becomes extensive, someone will open up a github issue, post the link to the issue on this mailinglist, and then the discussion continues on github. This is effective because it keeps long discussion about specific julia design areas that are of no interest to the larger julia-users crowd off this list here (which specifically is NOT about the development/design of julia, but about its use). At the same time those people that are interested in the topic can hammer out a great design on github. I feel this topic checks all the boxes: it is obviously super important and I’m glad there are people looking into how string handling can be improved in julia, but for the vast majority of readers of this list this is really off-topic, and it has taken up a very large share of traffic over the last week or so. So, a github issue seems ideal. Thanks, David From: julia-users@googlegroups.com [mailto:julia-users@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Scott Jones Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 5:30 AM To: julia-users@googlegroups.com; Tamas Papp Subject: Re: [julia-users] Performance variability - can we expect Julia to be the fastest (best) language? On May 4, 2015, at 7:56 AM, Tamas Papp <tkp...@gmail.com <mailto:tkp...@gmail.com> > wrote: On Mon, May 04 2015, Scott Jones <scott.paul.jo...@gmail.com <mailto:scott.paul.jo...@gmail.com> > wrote: On May 4, 2015, at 3:21 AM, Tamas Papp <tkp...@gmail.com <mailto:tkp...@gmail.com> > wrote: I think you misunderstand: IOBuffer is suggested not for mutable string operations in general, but only for efficient concatenation of many strings. Best, Tamas I don’t think that I misunderstood - it’s that using IOBuffer is the only solution that has been given here… and it doesn’t handle what I need to do efficiently... If you have a better solution, please let me know… 1. Can you share the benchmarks (and simplified, self-contained code) for your problem using IOBuffer? I have always found it very fast, but maybe what you are working on is different. It is very fast, for building up things in a buffer… the problem isn’t the speed of IOBuffer, it’s that you can’t do string operations on it (AFAIK), without going back and forth converting it to a immutable string… The other issue is not computer efficiency, but programmer efficiency… The syntax is clumsy, compared to doing something like: `MyBuff ..= “.ext”` I’m a firm believer that most of the time, programmer efficiency is more important than computer efficiency… (For the most part, I think Julia is incredibly good in that aspect, with the powerful metaprogramming and the way with parameterization it can generate a lot of special case code for me, saving me a lot of time, while producing code that is as fast as my hand specialized and optimized C code) 2. Do you have a specific algorithm in mind that would be more efficient? No, just many years of experience trying to speed up the compiler / interpreter of a language used heavily for string / database processing… I never wrote application code, just had customer requests for certain types of operations to be made faster… Best, Tamas Thanks for all the responses… It helps a Julia beginner like me a lot! Scott
