José, I suspect you don’t hear it enough, but I am very thankful and grateful to you for keeping up with all of these sorts of details and directing the Elixir language in a wise way. Thank you.

We don’t plan to offload much because our implementation is faster since it works exclusively on binaries. On average, 3x faster. The exception is String.normalize/2 that is faster in Erlang. We could likely make ours faster but since their version is fairly encapsulated in the :unicode module, it makes sense to depend on their implementation.

For integration between Elixir and OTP 20, there is this issue: Support Erlang 20 new features · Issue #5851 · elixir-lang/elixir · GitHub

Aww, I was just coming here to post this. ^.^

Here is the Release doc on Github at least: Release OTP 20.0 · erlang/otp · GitHub

I was keeping a watch on this feature so I am pretty sure the answer is “Yes”, but it works on literals. A literal is not something like 42 in this context, rather a literal is something like:

defmodule Blah do
  def bloop(), do:  %{a: 42, b: %{zwoop: 3}}
end

The %{a: 42, b: %{zwoop: 3}} part is the literal if my understanding is right, it is ‘baked into the compiled source’, thus it ‘always’ exists, meaning garbage collection does not need to be run on it and it can be passed in messages via a pointer (internally) instead of copying. Thus this should apply to ETS as well (as long as the information was passed in from the running system and not loaded from a file or so)

This is a huge performance feature for certain styles, I’ve been wanting it for a long time.