Can some erlanger explain why you are excited about certain things from the update?
It is nowhere near as ancient as sharks, nor as vicious, but it employs some new physiology, and can survive just as long.
But that was a very different world and it sticks out like an outsider, when really it's been there the whole time.
(sorry, this analogy got away from me a bit).
the socket library (if I am correct) is the beginning of redoing the entire network stack in a way that is more commensurate with the way that typical programmers expect (but with the right erlang-ey).
> Allow underscores in numeric literals to improve readability
This is great whenever a language does it.
> The embedded documentation is created as docchunks (EEP 48)
It looks like the erlang community is converging on the elixir strategy for documentation. This is fantastic, since elixir documentation is quite good, and it shows that the two languages are starting to put their friendly animosity aside and really working together.
> distributed named process groups is introduced
This is kind of huge. Sometimes you want a locking, fully consistent process management (so CRDTs are inappropriate), and you don't want a full raft/paxos under the hood.
Basically, what is exciting is how well engineered it is.
Other than a bunch of code reliant on the stuff removed from erl_interface, of course. No idea how big of an impact that has on real-world projects, though.
The deprecation of erlang:get_stacktrace/0 also gave me a brief heart attack for one of my projects¹, but luckily I had the foresight to gate that to older OTP versions (and with newer versions the relevant code already removes dependence on that function), so I can rest at least a little bit easy.
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¹: https://github.com/otpcl/otpcl/blob/73167c58771f700963cbd9f7...