That’s a good point, I forget that local vs remote calls have slightly different hot-code-reloading characteristics, and import vs alias determines if they are local or remote.
I’d be curious to see what the performance diff between the two is, even though it’s totally negligible to every application I can conceive of. I did some digging around the core erlang docs and BEAM internals book and there are slightly different instruction sets for them, but I couldn’t divine what the end cost to the caller would be.
At any rate, it’s the lowest level of perf difference possible above the bytecode level, so whichever produces the most maintainable code for one’s situation is to be preferred for sure!
