Creating long running NIFs (or something else)

You could use a simple TCP socket between the two programs. Erlang has great support for that. Your C program would connect to the TCP server. Have a look at gen_tcp — OTP 29.0.2 (kernel 11.0.2) .

UI naturally lends itself to message passing so I’d put a GenServer in front of your native UI code so as to make it innately serial (one message at a time / no parallel processing of messages).

As for the native interface, it could be C, Rust or anything you are comfortable with (but ergonomic caveats do still apply so I’d pick Rust 99% of the time).

Thanks, yes that could definitively work and I’ve used gen_tcp in the past.
I’m trying to learn a bit more about lower level code, with C and OpenGl in this case, and Erlang interfacing with these.

I’m not really knowledgeable when it comes to it so perhaps a tcp socket would be in fact the best way of doing it - but if say, you’re doing a lot of drawing wouldn’t it benefit somehow of being in a NIF ?

My idea would be that initially each tab would be a gen_statem, but eventually would move to being an erlang node. Then shared resources (caches, etc) would be shared through mnesia.

Yes, I’m not really comfortable with anything lower level hence why I want to practice - I chose C because I can’t understand what Rust brings on without understanding C - most examples for OpenGL go with c++ but I would really prefer to learn the basics first before going on some rabbit chasing

Fair. As a preliminary spoiler alert: in C it’s trivial to allocate a memory buffer of 10 bytes and then try to get a value from the 11th element. This, oversimplified, has been the reason for most of the security fiascos in the last several years.

Rust prevents those.

Very oversimplified I would guess

Wait a second, am I wrong that Rust does not prevent you from trying to grab the 11th element of a 10-vector! that’s a runtime panic. If you want erroring bounds checking you need a wrapped type

Ah, I was aiming at arrays.

And still, runtime panic isn’t the same as buffer [over|under]flow which can lead to the program being compromised. But I agree that panics aren’t very useful by themselves.

Just FYI you do have full access to OpenGL from elixir already today. Have a look at the wings3d project. It’s an OpenGL based 3d modeller written in Erlang http://www.wings3d.com/

Source code: GitHub - dgud/wings: Wings3D is an advanced sub-division 3D modeller. · GitHub

I had looked at wings (was surprised the forum still seems to be active), and also scenic that uses GLFW too, but got a bit overwhelmed on how to start/work the c part like from easy mode and build from there as that’s how I learn better. I will certainly look into them for inspiration.