March 18, 2023

Explained: How Elixir and Erlang Handle Arrays Functionally

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Explained: How Elixir and Erlang Handle Arrays Functionally

Source: readreplica.io

Erlang Functional Programming Concurrency

Troy Martin's article discusses the fundamental differences between handling arrays in imperative languages versus functional languages like Elixir and Erlang. Imperative languages use state mutations and destructive updates, allowing fast operations on arrays such as lookups and modifications due to contiguous memory allocation. In contrast, functional programming languages value immutability and referential transparency, resulting in different behaviors and efficiencies for array-like operations. Elixir and Erlang utilize singly-linked lists and tuples as substitutes for arrays, however, neither offers the efficient random access and update operations simultaneously. The :array implementation in Erlang's standard library fills this gap, modeled as an M-Ary tree structure that optimizes for both read (random access) and write (updates) performance. The Erlang :array uses a tree data structure with a base 10 logarithmic time complexity for access and updates, significantly improving over linear time complexity with pure lists or tuples. Despite being called an array, it's notably distinct from the traditional imperative array; updates to the :array structure result in conceptually 'new' arrays with most of the older data reused, maintaining efficiency and immutability.

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Aug 29, 2023