A few hours ago, the Erlang team announced the next release of the programming language and the entire platform.
Let me remind you that Erlang/OTP is designed to create highly scalable soft real-time systems with high availability requirements. The platform has long been successfully used in such areas as telecommunications, banking, e-commerce, telephony and instant messaging.
Main changes in this release:
- A new (experimental) socket module has been added that provides low-level access to OS sockets. This is not a replacement for gen_tcp and others, and does not yet work on Windows (on microbenchmark it showed a speed increase of ~40% compared to gen_tcp)
- Changed compilation stages and internal representations of the compiler to add new optimizations (detailed overview)
- Pattern matching optimizations for a binary data type now apply in more cases
- Large messages in the Erlang Distribution Protocol (responsible for transferring data between nodes) are now split into several fragments
- Focus on modules counters, atoms ΠΈ persistent_term added in 21.2 and expanding the set of tools for working in a competitive environment
Improvements also affected the length/1 function on long lists, ETS tables of the ordered_set type, the NIF interface received the enif_term_type function, erlc compiler options, SSL version and crypto module functions.
Blog post with a breakdown of the changes, examples and benchmarks
Source: linux.org.ru