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ElixirConf 2021 - Isaac Yonemoto - Zig (heart) Elixir

ElixirConf · 3.9K views · 2021-10-23 · 48:11

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Overview

Isaac Yonemoto's ElixirConf 2021 talk on Zigler, a library for writing Elixir NIFs in Zig. He looks at its internals and how it bridges the two languages while keeping the NIFs well behaved on the BEAM.

On Hacker News

HN threads on Zig and Elixir link it as the creator's explanation of how Zig NIFs can behave nicely inside the BEAM.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

Functional programmingC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages
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zigelixirziglernifsbeam

What people said

kristoff_it · 2024-10 · Recommendation

There's a series of things that a NIF must do to be a good citizen. Not crashing is a big one, but also not starving the VM by never yielding (in case the NIF is long-running) is important, plus a few secondary things like using the BEAM allocator so that tooling that monitors memory consumption can see resources consumed by the NIF. The creator of Zigler has a talk from ElixirConf 2021 on how he made Zig NIFs behave nicely: [VIDEO]

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brightball · 2021-11 · Recommendation

Really fascinating to see Zig being used to make Elixir cross platform! Exciting stuff. Here's a direct link to the ElixirConf talk: [VIDEO]

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dnautics · 2025-07 · Reference

something that I don't understand about the actual API: I maintain the zigler library, and one thing that was useful about the old async "colored-but-not-really" functions was that they implicitly tolerate having internal suspend points (detail: [VIDEO] ) -- I'm not sure if having IO be a passed parameter will still let me do that? Can users build their own functions with yield points? And will you be able to jump out of the frame of a function and give control back to the executor, to let it resume later?

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Sources

Video by ElixirConf, played through YouTube.

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