Language Bindings for Erlang Again

[Claes Wikstrom]

Yariv Sadan wrote:
>>
>> The long term, right approach would be to open the internals of
>> the emulator a little, but by reifying them cleanly, and to let
>> users write and load/unload dynamically their own BIFs.
> 
> Unless I have a serious gap in understanding, isn't there another
> danger with letting developers essentially create their own BIFs,
> because BIF calls block the entire Erlang system process, hence
> blocking all spawned Erlang processes during their execution? If one
> could easily create BIFs, either they would have to be executed in a
> separate system thread, creating the same complexity with regards to
> communication with the Erlang VM, or developers would have to be
> pretty careful not to write BIFs such as synchronouslyDefragMyDrive()

Writing a BIF would be equally complicated to writing a
linked in driver. C programmers that do that are supposed to
understand exactly what they're doing - and blocking seems like
one of the smaller obstacles to overcome.

Debugging BIFs and linked in drivers is hard - it's a really
unfriendly environment in the emulator.

/klacke


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Claes Wikstrom                        -- Caps lock is nowhere and
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