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It's more of "yeah it worked, but I had to do a lot of hand-holding" and "it passes the tests but I cannot tell if the code has memory leaks".

Actually, I can tell; I ran split on the C source and got things like this:

disk_space.c:144:16: Only storage bin.ref_bin (type void *) derived from variable declared in this scope is not released (memory leak)

So I'm looking into a Rust version with Rustler now.

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I'd also recommend having a look at the Zig library for Elixir. For simple stuff, you can just inline, but support for pretty complex setups too.

Also comes with a built-in BEAM allocator so the runtime properly reports NIF memory consumption.

https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html

Thanks, one day I'll look into Zig too, because I've been impressed with what Tigerbeetle has achieved with it! For now, I'm all-in on Elixir.

you can use zigler for a c nif, using easy_c (or c_src) options.

the big advantage is that it will automatically box/unbox to/from c values for you and generate sane error messages (which rustler does not, last i checked) when you pass incompatible terms in to the function.

on the other hand rustler lets you precompile (which is coming in a future version of Zigler)

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