[eeps] Activity

[Sverker Eriksson]

Robert Virding wrote:
> It has been pretty quiet here lately, is anything happening on the EEPs
> front. [...]

One piece of news is; ongoing work _related_ to EEP7 (Foreign Function 
Interface).

The work in progress goes under the name NIF, Native Implemented 
Function(s).
It's a way to implement some functions of a module in native language (C).

This would offer a simpler way to execute native code within the 
emulator when you don't want all the semantics of a driver.
The aim is to treat the native library as part of the module and load 
and upgrade it together with the beam-file.

This is not an implementation of the Foreign Function Interface in EEP7, 
which suggests a way for Erlang code to call *any* native library.
The NIF concept could however be used to implement EEP7, instead of 
using a driver as the current reference implementation does.

An experimental version will most probably be included in coming releases.

/Sverker, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson