Binaries are in reality just byte arrays and binary_part is just make_binary(old + start, length), so I highly doubt that you can get any faster than that.
hauleth
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stefanluptak
That make sense. I thought that charlist is in fact the same, so I don’t understand the speed difference.
I just started watching Johanna’s talk about string processing performance. I hope I will learn something new and useful. 
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axelson
Scenic Core Team
Charlists are lists which are implemented as linked lists. And to iterate through the linked list you need to follow a bunch of pointers which is O(n).
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stefanluptak
Ah OK. Thanks a lot. So if I understand this correctly, charlist is a standard Elixir List container implemented as linked list in this case containing integers that represent code points and String is piece of memory and to “iterate” over it’s content we just need to increment the memory address. Am I right?
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