[erlang-questions] 19.x <-> 18.x wire protocol incompatibility ?

[Alexandre Snarskii]

Hi!

Got into interesting 'does not work' situation while connecting newly 
deployed c-node (compiled with otp 19.0 libraries) with older 18.3 
erlang node: nodes were unable to communicate with messages

2016-10-12 18:43:28.404 [warning] emulator '<erlang node name>' got a 
  corrupted external term from '<c-node name>' on distribution channel ...

logged on erlang side. 

After some research, root cause was isolated: C-node was initialized using 
ei_connect_xinit with random() % 16 for its creation id. In 18.x, Pid of 
C-node was encoded as ERL_PID_EXT and used only two lower bits of creation id.
However, in 19.x there is a new Pid wire presentation, ERL_NEW_PID_EXT, which
encodes all 32 bits of creation id. Worse yet, this presentation is 
automatically selected for encoding any Pid with creation id > 3, and, 
as this presentation is not known by older 18.x nodes, this leads to
connection drop.

Solution: if you expect your C-nodes to communicate with pre-19.x erlang
nodes, you may use only values 0..3 for creation id. In my case I just
replaced random() % 16 with random() % 4.
 
Question: may be it makes sense to document this wire protocol incompatibility
somewhere ?