Lambda the Ultimate

Since 2001, the functional language Erlang comes with a byte-oriented datatype (called binary) and with constructs to do pattern matching on a binary. We have been heavily involved in this work and implemented a scheme for native code compilation of binaries and designed efficient algorithms for constructing deterministic pattern matching automata for byte-based binaries. In last year's Erlang workshop we put forward a proposal for lifting the restriction that Erlang binaries are sequences of bytes rather than bits and described the semantics of bit-level pattern matching on a bit-level binary (called bit stream). We have subsequently realized this proposal and describe its applications and implementation in this paper.

Be sure to see the benchmarks on page 13 comparing Erlang, Haskell, Objective Caml, C, and Java for processing binary data. Having used the existing binary pattern matching support in Erlang, I'm looking forward to the official language support for bit streams.