@sergio
After messing with queues a lot today, here is what I dislike about :queue:
- The datatype it works with does not (and cannot) implement protocols.
- The datatype it works with does not show to the user what it is: It is indistinguishable from any other two-tuple. Introspection is a great tool to help a new person who reads your code (or a stacktrace).
- The
:queuemodule has three different name aliases for most functions. - There are only a few functions that allow you to manipulate
:queues in an enumerable-like way. The only other approach you can take is to first convert it to a list. - It cannot be used in pipes as it follows Erlang’s convention to have the most significant argument as last argument.
- Because it is an Erlang module, we do not have documentation for it in
IEx. - insertion and extraction are amortized O(1). Its implementation means that if someone first inserts n = 100_000 items, then retrieving the first inserted item afterwards is going to mean that this list with a n = 100_000 elements first needs to be reversed. As @OvermindDL1 noted: List reversal is a native piece of code that is relatively fast; still I expect that at a certain n, it becomes too slow and too unpredictable, and a hard constant time variant should be used instead.
