Erlang/OTP 29.0

4 hours ago (erlang.org)

Looks like a nice set of improvements. Disabling the SSH daemon [0] by default is a good security change, same with disabling the SFTP by default.

I think the io_ansi [1] module sounds pretty cool, imo erlang doesn't have a great story for building complicated CLI applications right now, but I haven't tried much. I imagine having this in the stdlib will be a nice leg up in the future. The way fwrite works seamlessly across nodes is very nice, and exactly what I love to see from erlang.

The addition of Native Records [2] is really cool. I'm curious how this will be leveraged in Elixir in the future, since right now I think there is a mix of records, tuples, and maps depending on exactly what is being done. Like the EEP says, I doubt we'll ever see the old records deprecated entirely but this looks like a substantial improvement.

[0] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/ssh/ssh.html

[1] https://www.erlang.org/docs/29/apps/stdlib/io_ansi.html

[2] https://github.com/erlang/eep/pull/81

  • I don't think the ssh daemon was ever automatically enabled or started. The two bullet points are phrased differently, but I think they mean the same thing, when starting the ssh daemon, the listed parts won't be started by default.

    > The SSH daemon now defaults to disabled for shell and exec services, implementing the “secure by default” principle. This prevents authenticated users from executing arbitrary Erlang code unless explicitly configured.

    > The SFTP subsystem is no longer enabled by default when starting an SSH daemon.

I'm interested to see how records play out in the ecosystem.

  • I was about to say "what, we've had records for decades" but then I read the changelog.

    Interesting. I wonder if there a world where Elixir starts compiling maps to "native records"?