A few good fixes and enhancements, SSL added more methods and is faster, socket polling is faster, however 2 big things that I like!

• New counters and atomics modules supplies access to highly efficient operations on mutable fixed word sized variables.

The new :atomics module wraps the low level hardware atomic instructions without any locking, it’s use-cases are limited but EXTREMELY useful for where they are useful. I find it odd how the array part is 1-indexed though, erlang has a lot of mixed 0-index and 1-index code, and 1-indexed means the math is harder… blah…

The new :counters module uses the new :atomics module to do ETS-style counter handling but using hardware atomic instructions so there is no locking or cost. Same thing with the really weird non-mathematical 1-indexed arrays though.

• New module persistent_term!. Lookups are in constant time! No copying the terms!

You know the global module that discord put out that recompiles a module to bake terms into it for super-fast referencing and no-copies and so forth? That’s basically the new erlang persistent_term library! Here’s a use session in Elixir!

iex(1)> :persistent_term.info()                        
%{count: 0, memory: 152}
iex(2)> :persistent_term.put(:blah, 42)
:ok
iex(3)> :persistent_term.info()        
%{count: 1, memory: 192}
iex(4)> :persistent_term.get(:blah)
42
iex(5)> :persistent_term.get()     
[blah: 42]
iex(6)> :persistent_term.put(:blorp, make_ref())
:ok
iex(7)> :persistent_term.get()                  
[blah: 42, blorp: #Reference<0.3525248772.1957167107.195526>]
iex(8)> :persistent_term.erase(:blah)
true
iex(9)> :persistent_term.get()                  
[blorp: #Reference<0.3525248772.1957167107.195526>]
iex(10)> :persistent_term.info()
%{count: 1, memory: 216}

So it’s slow to put but crazy-fast to get, reference, and pass around the values stored within! In general you shouldn’t use this unless you know what you are doing as there is no garbage collection, should generally be used for global settings and data, etc…