A stream library using Erlang binaries

Abstract

An implementation of a Stream Library for erlang is described which uses Built-In Functions (BIFs) for fast access. The approach uses binaries to represent and process stream data in high volume, high performance applications. The library is intended to assist developers dealing with communication protocols, purely textual content, formatted data records and the routing of streamed data. The new BIFs are shown to improve performance as much as 250 times over native erlang functions. The reduction in memory usage caused by the BIFs also allows successful processing in situations that crashed the runtime as application functions.