I was reading the EEP-79, and thinking about the poor record support in Elixir(i’ve tried to discuss about that in the forum before). I see 2 clear advantages of native-records over structs, mainly it being a enforced natively by the runtime and the fact that it avoids creating modules just to define new data structures.

1. on being enforced by the runtime:
   currently there is a misguiding property on structs that guarding against a struct %MyStruct{} is actually just a validation on %{__struct__: MyStruct}. while with native-records it gonna be enforced that it have all fields. this makes native-records more reliable, so you don’t accidentally use Map.drop/2 on a struct and passes a bad structured data.
2. on avoiding creating modules just to hold a data structure:
   native-records are defined by #module.record{}, this allows to create multiple records in a single module, making it easy to handle and providing a better named scope for the data structure. this avoids the overuse of modules just to define a new struct.

I didn’t spot any mention to how native-records would work on distributed erlang and what would be the expected behavior on conflicting definitions when you send data from one node to another(that being one of my problems with relying too much on structs). but just those 2 points I think is a reason to prefer native-records.

I’m not sure if the core team is already discussing how to deal with native-records, but i’d really like it to be well supported by elixir(I still think named anonymous functions could be supported by elixir, for example, and I know I missed that train). So if the discussion is not supposed to be on closed doors, I’d like to start it here.

I personally see 3 possible ways to how it gonna unfold:

1. no support or half-baked support just as it happens with current records.
2. new semantics for records/native-records meaning probably new syntax around it.
3. converge structs and native-records to be a single thing.

I really hope that 1 doesn’t happen, and 3 is too big of a heavy lift(even heavier if we consider the efforts on the type system) to be done right away. the more reasonable/sane approach would seem to be 2, maybe with converging both in a far future 2.0 elixir version.

but I really would like to know if there are any plans from the core team on that subject.