[amdsn]

NIFs have the downside of potentially bringing down the VM don't they? It's definitely true that the glue code can be a pain and may involve warping the foreign code into having a piece that plays along nicely with what erlang expects. I messed around with making erlang code and python code communicate using erl_interface and the code to handle messages pretty much devolved into "have a running middleman process that invokes erl_interface utilities in python via a cffi wrapper, then finally call your actual python code." Some library may exist or could be written to help with that, but it's a lot when you just wanna invoke some function elsewhere. I also have not tried using port drivers, the experience may be a bit different there.

[hosh]

NIFs do have that downside. Rust NIFs mitigates some of those risks, but that doesn't work so well with other languages.

Port drivers have their own tradeoffs, but you can retain the fault isolation.

[toast0]

Yeah, NIFs are dynamically linked into the running VM, and generally speaking, if you load a binary library, you can do whatever, including crashing the VM.

BEAM has 4 ways to closely integrate with native code: NIFs, linked in ports, OS process ports (fork/ecommunicate over a pipe), and foreign nodes (C Nodes). You can also integrate through normal networking or pipes too. Everything has plusses and minusses.

[pdimitar]

Yeah, a NIF can bring down the entire OS process but I've used quite a bit of Rust NIFs with Elixir and never once had a crash. With Rust you can make sure nothing ever goes down, minus stuff that's completely out of your control of course (like a driver crash).