> On May 4, 2015, at 7:56 AM, Tamas Papp <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, May 04 2015, Scott Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>> On May 4, 2015, at 3:21 AM, Tamas Papp <[email protected]> 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


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