erl_interface

[Kent Boortz]

Rick Pettit <rpettit@REDACTED> writes:
> I am also curious as to who is maintaining the erl_interface, as well as 
> how actively they are maintaining it and if it is considered "stable" by 
> the Erlang masses.

Strange question. The OTP team is maintaining it ;-)

When other parts of the system is updated that have an effect on
erl_interface then it is updated and new test cases are written.
Erl_interface is used by our customers in real products so it should
be considered "stable". If you find it not to be, please let us know
in what way it needs improvements. Erl_interface is also used by
the code generated by the IDL compiler. I'm not sure but I think
some customers use IDL and C as well.

I daily feel that we let you, OpenSource users, down not being active
enough on the mailing list, not updating www.erlang.org often enough,
not thanking for the valuable patches and bug reports enough, not
adding your sent patches fast enough and not providing new
intermediate releases often enough. We also sit on the documentation
system and the test server that should have been released as
OpenSource years ago.

OTP has become a very complex product and we are very few to maintain,
improve and add new functionality to it. We have to put priority to
the paying customers and there is very little time left for other
work. We also have a strong focus on stability and backward
compatibility because of the type of products our customers create
using Erlang/OTP. This sometimes makes it a slow process rewriting
parts that in the best of worlds should be rewritten from scratch.

This focus doesn't always fit well with an OpenSource product. Code
sent so us don't always make it into the product. We could branch of
the OpenSource version from the commercial version but our lack of
time will make it hard to merge improvements and bug fixes done in the
commercial version into the OpenSource version.

We could do more but we do provide you with all the bug fixes, release
notes, documentation, new code and try to answer questions on the
mailing list. We also test the OpenSource build daily on FreeBSD and
different Linux versions (our commercial build is slightly different,
it is done direct within our CM system). We merge changes from the
Hipe project and run daily tests with Hipe and unified heap.

We are strongly determined to support the OpenSource version of
Erlang/OTP the best way we can. And I hope that you will continue
to help us improve Erlang/OTP,

kent