May 29, 2025

Zigler: Zig NIFs for Elixir with Isaac Yonemoto

43 minutes

In the Season 14 premiere, hosts Dan Ivovich and Sundi Myint chat with Isaac Yonemoto, creator of the Zigler library, to explore how Zigler brings Zig’s performance and safety to Elixir through Native Implemented Functions (NIFs). Isaac walks through the core design of Zigler and how it auto-generates the Elixir-to-Zig bridge, enforces type safety, and exposes multiple execution modes (normal, dirty, threaded). The conversation covers real-world applications, from SIMD-powered token selection for LLM hardware acceleration to OTP-style fault tolerance in low-level code.

Isaac shares his own journey: stepping back from professional software work to launch a biotech startup focused on reducing drug manufacturing costs while continuing to maintain Zigler and even leveraging Elixir for bioinformatics pipelines.

Topics discussed in this episode:

What is the Zigler library and what does it do?

What does it mean to run a "dirty NIF"?

Async mode is temporarily removed from Zig (therefore, yielding NIFs is temporarily deprecated in Zigler)

Zigler’s three execution modes (normal, dirty, and threaded) and how you switch modes with a single config change

Isaac’s journey from professional software work to launching a biotech startup

How Isaac leverages Elixir in bioinformatics pipelines at his startup

LLM hardware acceleration using Zigler NIFs and SIMD-powered token picking

Fault-tolerant load balancing of NIF workloads via OTP principles

Transparent handling and recovery from hardware failures through monitoring

Potential future memory-safety features in Zig and their implications

The Elixir-based borrow-checker prototype: purpose and design

Unit-checking for scientific computations to enforce correctness

New OS support in Zigler 0.14: macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD

Inline Zig code authoring directly within Elixir modules

Isaac's commitment to maintain Zigler through its 1.0 release (...and beyond?)

Links mentioned:

https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler

https://github.com/ziglang/zig

https://vidalalabs.com/

Zig Programming Language: https://ziglang.org/

https://obsidian.md/

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/macros.html

https://erlang.org/documentation/doc-4.7.3/doc/extensions/macros.html

A Deep Dive Into the Elixir AST: https://dorgan.ar/posts/2021/04/the_elixir_ast/

https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/nif.html

https://nodejs.org/en

Llama Open-Source LLM: https://www.llama.com/

Mixtral Open-Source LLM: https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts

https://Fly.io

SIMD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_data

https://opentrons.com/

CI/CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CI/CD

https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html

http://www.x.com/DNAutics

https://bsky.app/profile/dnautics.bsky.social

...more

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By SmartLogic LLC

4.9

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