Comments on: Erlang First Post http://www.zorched.net/2008/05/27/erlang-first-post/ Musings of a software developer in Milwaukee, WI. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:11:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Geoff Lane http://www.zorched.net/2008/05/27/erlang-first-post/#comment-11752 Geoff Lane Wed, 28 May 2008 15:06:07 +0000 http://www.zorched.net/?p=105#comment-11752 Grant, You're getting beyond my knowledge real fast... but I'll give it a shot. :) Elang has a couple of notions. Ports and Drivers. Ports are basically external processes that you interact with very much like other Erlang processes. It has a few special methods that allow you to send bytes to them for example. This can be anything from a manually loaded library to an executable that you run from within Erlang by supplying the command. FFI (Foreign Function Interface) is handled by what they call Linked In Drivers. My novice understanding is that Erlang provides some C API that you have to use to integrate existing code. That C code then becomes a shared library that can be loaded into the Erlang runtime and executed. Erlang does not have an imperative style to "bridge" to imperative languages to my knowledge. Grant,
You’re getting beyond my knowledge real fast… but I’ll give it a shot. :)
Elang has a couple of notions. Ports and Drivers.

Ports are basically external processes that you interact with very much like other Erlang processes. It has a few special methods that allow you to send bytes to them for example. This can be anything from a manually loaded library to an executable that you run from within Erlang by supplying the command.

FFI (Foreign Function Interface) is handled by what they call Linked In Drivers. My novice understanding is that Erlang provides some C API that you have to use to integrate existing code. That C code then becomes a shared library that can be loaded into the Erlang runtime and executed.

Erlang does not have an imperative style to “bridge” to imperative languages to my knowledge.

]]> By: Grant Rettke http://www.zorched.net/2008/05/27/erlang-first-post/#comment-11749 Grant Rettke Wed, 28 May 2008 14:43:45 +0000 http://www.zorched.net/?p=105#comment-11749 Erlang is purely functional, how do you do imperative coding, for example FFI to C? Erlang is purely functional, how do you do imperative coding, for example FFI to C?

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