Talk has been postponed to SF elixir/erlang February due to difficulty of finding a venue for this month!
ityonemo
ityonemo
yeah, sorry the talk got pushed back and then it ran into codebeam, because TheRealReal wanted to give a talk, then covid happened, so…
also I’m slammed at work, so the new release is about 1.5 weeks out perpetually for the next two more weeks at least. =/
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ityonemo
Version 0.3.0-pre has landed with support for Zig 0.6.0. Support for “Long Nifs” which are Nifs that run in their own OS thread is currently disabled (pending investigation of most effective use of Zig async methodology). Other major improvements include a completely overhauled Zig Parser and support for Resources. Full, correct documentation and fixing long nifs will be released with the proper 0.3.0 release, but I wanted to spin up a few demos that leverage the Zig 0.6.0 standard library first.
The couple of demos I intend to write are:
- ICMP ping library for elixir
- Fast, safe (flushes the JSON binary from the shared binary memory) JSON parser using arena allocation and builtin BEAM allocator.
I would like to compare the performance JSON parser to an equivalent package made with rustler, so if anyone knows of the preferred Rust JSON parser that would be appreciated. Or, if anyone would like an easy demo, I can try my hand at it.
Things to look forward to:
I’m thinking about releasing Nerves support in the v0.3.0 series where the native cross-compilation capabilities of Zig are used to allow you to seamlessly cross-compile NIF modules in to your nerves releases.
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ityonemo
(a very sketchy) ICMP library has been completed: Zing, basic Elixir ICMP ('ping') server using Zig NIF
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ityonemo
Zigler 0.3.0 is out. It’s validated to work with releases! I also eliminated the “get_zig” mix task, so it will automatically download zig for you. And also, it works with Nerves, performing cross-compilation to ARM binaries out of the box. zigler v0.16.0 — Documentation
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kip
ex_cldr Core Team
Hmmmmm I wonder if you think zigler would be a good approach to writing NIFs that wrap C libs - given that you’ve made the NIF part easy and Zig can call C libs without any FFI getting in the way.
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ityonemo
It’s in there in the docs “Zig is likely to be an easier glue language for C ABIs than C.”. 
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kip
ex_cldr Core Team
Thanks much, yes, I should have read the docs. I know what my weekend project is now at least 
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ityonemo
The tests contain an example where I call a BLAS function. This is an area where it’s kind of hard to test and hard to document so if you find a problem let me know!
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