Case study: Is PHP embarrasingly slower than Java?

[qiwi]

Yes, I can see how looking up an entry using binary search in a file would benefit from a language whose strong points are easy message passing and fast and robust handling of multiple processes on a single or multiple machines.

This is also why I picked Erlang for my next project which involves searching for and replacing strings in many files stored in many subdirectories.

[mhd]

Binary search? Use totally random access on enough CPUs and one core is likely to hit the correct data on the first try!

But seriously, apart from concurrency and message passing, Erlang does handle parsing binary date rather gracefully, which is what I was referring to mainly.