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Rustler: Bridging Elixir and Rust with Sonny Scroggin
Rustler Core Team Member Sonny Scroggin joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs. Rustler serves as a bridge to write Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) in Rust that can be called from Elixir code. This combo leverages Rust's performance and memory safety while maintaining Elixir's fault tolerance and concurrency model, creating a powerful solution for CPU-intensive operations within Elixir applications.
Sonny provides guidance on when developers should consider using NIFs versus other approaches like ports or external services and highlights the considerations needed when stepping outside Elixir's standard execution model into native code.
Looking toward the future, Sonny discusses exciting developments for Rustler, including an improved asynchronous NIF interface, API modernization efforts, and better tooling. While Rust offers tremendous performance benefits for specific use cases, Sonny emphasizes that Elixir's dynamic nature and the BEAM's capabilities for distributed systems remain unmatched for many applications. Rustler simply provides another powerful tool that expands what developers can accomplish within the Elixir ecosystem.
Key topics discussed in this episode:
Links mentioned:
https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust
https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites
https://www.php.net/
https://xmpp.org/
https://jabberd2.org/
Geocities: https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/ (fun fact: when you search Geocities on Google, the results page is in Comic Sans font.)
https://bleacherreport.com/
https://hexdocs.pm/jose/readme.html
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen
Erlang Ports: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/c_port.html
Erlang ETFs (External Term Format): https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html
Elixir gRPC https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc
gRPC (“Remote Proceduce Call”): https://grpc.io/
dirty_cpu.ex https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler/blob/main/lib/zig/nif/dirty_cpu.ex
ets https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/ets.html
Mnesia https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/mnesia.html
VPPs (Virtual Power Plants): https://www.energy.gov/lpo/virtual-power-plants
https://nixos.org/
WASM WebAssembly with Elixir: https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Orb
Rust Tokio https://tokio.rs/
Getting Started:
https://hexdocs.pm/rustler/0.17.0/Mix.Tasks.Rustler.New.html
https://rustup.rs/
Special Guest: Sonny Scroggin.
View all episodes
By SmartLogic LLC
4.9
2222 ratings
Rustler Core Team Member Sonny Scroggin joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs. Rustler serves as a bridge to write Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) in Rust that can be called from Elixir code. This combo leverages Rust's performance and memory safety while maintaining Elixir's fault tolerance and concurrency model, creating a powerful solution for CPU-intensive operations within Elixir applications.
Sonny provides guidance on when developers should consider using NIFs versus other approaches like ports or external services and highlights the considerations needed when stepping outside Elixir's standard execution model into native code.
Looking toward the future, Sonny discusses exciting developments for Rustler, including an improved asynchronous NIF interface, API modernization efforts, and better tooling. While Rust offers tremendous performance benefits for specific use cases, Sonny emphasizes that Elixir's dynamic nature and the BEAM's capabilities for distributed systems remain unmatched for many applications. Rustler simply provides another powerful tool that expands what developers can accomplish within the Elixir ecosystem.
Key topics discussed in this episode:
Links mentioned:
https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust
https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites
https://www.php.net/
https://xmpp.org/
https://jabberd2.org/
Geocities: https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/ (fun fact: when you search Geocities on Google, the results page is in Comic Sans font.)
https://bleacherreport.com/
https://hexdocs.pm/jose/readme.html
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen
Erlang Ports: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/c_port.html
Erlang ETFs (External Term Format): https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html
Elixir gRPC https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc
gRPC (“Remote Proceduce Call”): https://grpc.io/
dirty_cpu.ex https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler/blob/main/lib/zig/nif/dirty_cpu.ex
ets https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/ets.html
Mnesia https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/mnesia.html
VPPs (Virtual Power Plants): https://www.energy.gov/lpo/virtual-power-plants
https://nixos.org/
WASM WebAssembly with Elixir: https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Orb
Rust Tokio https://tokio.rs/
Getting Started:
https://hexdocs.pm/rustler/0.17.0/Mix.Tasks.Rustler.New.html
https://rustup.rs/
Special Guest: Sonny Scroggin.
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