Hacker News Reader

> Messages are always copied before being inserted into the queue. As wasteful as this may sound it greatly reduces garbage collection (GC) latency as the GC never has to look beyond a single process.

This means there is no structural sharing, which can be troublesome with huge data structures. (Edit: not entirely true, see comments below)

View on HN

The only sharing is for large binaries (>64 bytes)[0].

Like all messaging mechanisms, this can be handled by passing a reference or id, and the receiver fetching the actual large data from db/file/source of truth.

[0] - http://erlang.2086793.n4.nabble.com/how-message-size-effects...

> The only sharing is for large binaries

Can you also share small objects by reference? (I.e. prevent serialization of a large tree composed of small objects)

And refer to those objects through pointers (avoiding an expensive db layer)?

> Can you also share small objects by reference?

No.

But, you can use a cheap cache layer instead of expensive db layer - ETS.

Ok, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com