[erlang-questions] Erlang FFI: status report

[Alceste Scalas]

Il giorno lun, 09/06/2008 alle 10.11 -0500, tsuraan ha scritto:
> Has any progress been made on the libffi integration for Erlang?  I'm
> very interested in this, so is there anything I can do to help, or are
> the details with blocking calls and stability still just being ironed
> out?  Is there a good place to get news on active EEPs?  The page for
> EEP7 isn't exactly active, and it just says to ping this news group
> for information.

The news is that there are no news :-)

The FFI patches published on [1] are the last version I've developed,
and we're using them daily here at CRS4.  Based on our experience, they
are stable.  Blocking calls are a feature, and not a bug (the FFI does
*not* want to replace the Erlang driver interface, but just simplify
some common cases of native function calls).

Since we are still using OTP R11B-5, there are no FFI patches for OTP
R12B (yet).  However, I've received some feedback, and one voluntary
developer is (was?) actually working on porting the patches --- but
nothing has been released so far.  If nothing changes, I'll work on it
when we'll switch to OTP R12B.

Regarding a possible timeline, the FFI has been defined a "tentative
goal for 2008" from the Erlang/OTP Development Team at Ericsson [2].  If
I receive some feedback about the EEP 7 status, we (at CRS4) may decide
to change our priorities and work on the R12B FFI patches sooner than
later.

Regards,

alceste

References:

  [1] Foreign Function Interface for Erlang/OTP
      http://muvara.org/crs4/erlang/ffi

  [2] Kenneth Lundin
      "News from the Erlang/OTP Development team at Ericsson"
      Presentation at the Erlang/OTP User Conference 2007, pag.15
      http://www.erlang.se/euc/07/papers/1630OTPupdateEUC07.pdf

-- 
Alceste Scalas <alceste@REDACTED>
CRS4 - http://www.crs4.it/