[erlang-questions] Writing c nodes using c interfaces

[James Long]

Hey guys,

   I'm very new to Erlang, but I like it a lot so far.  I have nodes
up and running and communicating, and now the next step is to create a
c node that can seamlessly join this network.

   This seemed straightforward at first when looking at the
Interoperability Tutorial from erlang's website
(http://www.erlang.org/doc/tutorial/part_frame.html).  Using
erl_interface, I wrote some code to start a c node server.  However,
when I tried to connect to it, erl_accept failed, and I couldn't
figure out why.

    I did some more research and I found the ei_connect library, and
it looks like that's the newer version of the c interface.  Is that
correct?  I started rewriting my code to use the ei_* functions,
however there isn't much documentation on them.  The only page I could
find is the library reference
(http://web.mit.edu/erlang_vR10B-10/arch/sun4x_510/lib/erlang/lib/erl_interface-3.5.5/doc/html/ei_connect.html).

   The only thing I couldn't find on that page is a better explanation
of ei_receive_msg().  The old erl_receive_msg function filled in a
ErlMessage structure which had a member variable 'msg' which contained
the msg.  I can't find anything like that in the new erlang_msg
structure that ei_receive_msg uses.  Is the message in the ei_x_buff
variable that it takes in, and if so, could someone show my how to use
ei_x_buff as an erlang term?  I can't find any documentation on that
structure as it looks to be new.

Here's the new erlang_msg structure, which looks like it's all
information about the message, but no message itself:

typedef struct {
    long msgtype;
    erlang_pid from;
    erlang_pid to;
    char toname[MAXATOMLEN+1];
    char cookie[MAXATOMLEN+1];
    erlang_trace token;
} erlang_msg;