> Another thing that I would say Pony has that Erlang doesn't is an easy FFI mechanism
(Disclaimer, self-promotion):
It doesn't get easier than this: https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html
(I'll be dropping direct c support in there in the next release)
(Disclaimer, self-promotion):
It doesn't get easier than this: https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html
(I'll be dropping direct c support in there in the next release)
I think the biggest hurdles when writing NIFs are:
* Interacting with Erlang terms from C/Rust/Zig. Admittedly both zigler and rustler help in this regard, by wrapping Erlang terms. Pony is able to expose raw pointers and structs to C, which I've felt easier to work with.
* Dealing with the Beam's preemptive scheduler. This isn't as big of a problem now with dirty schedulers but still a mismatch compared to normal Erlang code. Pony uses a cooperative scheduler everywhere, so you'll already be used to splitting long tasks in different steps by the time you need to use the FFI, which makes the transition easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l848TOmI6LI
(this is an old api, there is a new api that makes the modes completely interchangeable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpRK9BC0-I8)