3 ms·

Since you relate this example to Go, would you mind sharing thoughts about how heavy I/O from network sockets compares between the two or gotchas that might not

• latch 5y ago
  I think they're both relatively straightfoward, with the biggest difference being active mode. (I'll use "Elixir", but it all applies to Erlang as well). Elixir sockets can be safely shared between processes, which might not be obvious to an Elixir programmer. To the best of my knowledge, Elixir will use writev where possible, so it's iolist friendly and can be extremely efficient. Binary pattern is a productivity boost when it comes to networking work. Every Elixir socket is associated with a "controlling_process". This creates a link between the socket and the process. The linked article uses it. You generally don't want this to be the acceptor loop, since if the acceptor loop crashed, it would close every socket. Fun fact, I believe earlier versions had bugs / race conditions with respect to changing the controlling_process while data was incoming. This has since been fixed, and things "just work" like you expect, but I can only imagine that it involved some coding gymnastics to fix. Since the Elixir sockets are more abstracted, there's more knobs you can turn and tweak, e.g., you can tweak the buffers that Erlang is using to read/write. Or it has built-in parsers for common formats, including simple things like automatically being able to send/receive 1, 2, or 4 byte length-prefixed messages. Elixir has two socket APIs. The traditional gen_tcp, and a new one, socket, which is meant to be "as close as possible to the OS level socket interface." I haven't tried the new one yet.