Comment by overbring_labs
1 day ago
It's more of "yeah it worked, but I had to do a lot of hand-holding" and "it passes the tests but I cannot tell if the code has memory leaks".
Actually, I can tell; I ran split on the C source and got things like this:
disk_space.c:144:16: Only storage bin.ref_bin (type void *) derived from variable declared in this scope is not released (memory leak)
So I'm looking into a Rust version with Rustler now.
I'd also recommend having a look at the Zig library for Elixir. For simple stuff, you can just inline, but support for pretty complex setups too.
Also comes with a built-in BEAM allocator so the runtime properly reports NIF memory consumption.
https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html
Thanks, one day I'll look into Zig too, because I've been impressed with what Tigerbeetle has achieved with it! For now, I'm all-in on Elixir.
you can use zigler for a c nif, using easy_c (or c_src) options.
the big advantage is that it will automatically box/unbox to/from c values for you and generate sane error messages (which rustler does not, last i checked) when you pass incompatible terms in to the function.
on the other hand rustler lets you precompile (which is coming in a future version of Zigler)