Zigler: zig nifs for Elixir

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41

Remember calling a NIF is not cheap, you want to minimize the number of calls and do as much work during a single call as is possible. That sounds like it’s doubling the cost?

42

that’s probably true, i bet it will kill the performance of JSON, but I can see other uses for this!

43

I’m not really sure. Why not just wait on the first NIF to return? Having two calls is not really a way on the beam for start and get without wrapping into a process, which is the pattern someone would try to do anyway.

44

Ill be giving a short ~15-20 minute talk on Zigler on the “rolling Zig community meetup” zig.show, if you’d like to learn about how Zigler works under the hood, I’ll do a shallow dive into the zig portion of the “secret sauce” of Zigler: https://zig.show/ on sunday morning (US time); sunday afternoon (europe time), sunday night (asia time). This will also be eventually published to youtube.

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45

Updated to 0.7.1

Zig version is now bumped to 0.7.1

Now supports threaded, yielding, and dirty nifs. Consult the documentation guides on how to use these different long-running nif methods:

Regression: nerves is (temporarily) not supported until the arm32 architecture becomes tier 1. If you would like to use zig with nerves, consider using v0.3.2.

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47

Updated to 0.8.1

Zig version is bumped to 0.8.1

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

Major highlights:

  • Supports cancellation of threaded and yielding nifs by killing the owning process.
  • When compiled with debug symbols, zig “error return traces” are merged with elixir exception stacktraces.
  • Supports idiomatic "std.testing.*’ zig stdlib functions for running zig tests
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48

Version 0.9.1 is released!

Zig version updated to 0.9.1:

Major highlights: Support for c and c++ compilation using the sources option:

https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html#module-compiling-c-c-files

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49

Zigler version 0.10.1 is released, with a redone API, fully updated documentation and guides.

Big highlight is “easy_c” which lets you mount a c library (or supplied c code) and allows you to integrate C libraries as nifs in an intuitive fashion without having to write error-prone glue code by hand.

https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/6-c_integration.html

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50

Is there a way to write the zig code in a .zig file so I can get all the goodness of an editor w/LSP, syntax highlighting, etc… for my zig code?

51

Very quick search in the docs tell me you can - Zig — zigler v0.10.3.

52

It seems that with that method, you write your code in a .zig file, but then still have to wrap every function you wish to expose to Elixir in that external .zig file within the Elixir module?

I was looking for a method that didn’t require that duplication of effort. Or did I misunderstand how it works?

53

It was an oversight that I didn’t build it in 0.10. this feature will come in 0.11

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54

actually in the meantime, you can probably (haven’t tried it, kinda guessing) get the result you want by doing:

~Z"""
pub usingnamespace @import("file-to-import.zig");
"""
55

Just a FYI, when I tried the pub usingnamespace trick, I get:

** (KeyError) key :pub not found
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) lib/zig.parser.ex:272: Zig.Parser.put_opt/3
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) lib/zig.parser/top_level_decl.ex:5: Zig.Parser.TopLevelDecl.post_traverse/5
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser."TopLevelDecl__22"/6
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser."ContainerDeclarations__4"/6
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser."ContainerMembers__0"/6
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser."Root__4"/6
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser.parser__1/6
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) Zig.Parser.parser/2
    (zig_parser 0.1.9) lib/zig.parser.ex:179: Zig.Parser.parse/1
    (zigler 0.10.3) lib/zig/compiler.ex:85: Zig.Compiler.compile/4
    (zigler 0.10.3) expanding macro: Zig.Compiler.__before_compile__/1

It’s OK if the feature is coming in 0.11. Thanks for giving it a shot!

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