Erlang/OTP 29.0

137 points by pyinstallwoes 4 hours ago on hackernews | 12 comments

solid_fuel | 3 hours ago

Looks like a nice set of improvements. Disabling the SSH daemon [0] by default is a good security change, same with disabling the SFTP by default.

I think the io_ansi [1] module sounds pretty cool, imo erlang doesn't have a great story for building complicated CLI applications right now, but I haven't tried much. I imagine having this in the stdlib will be a nice leg up in the future. The way fwrite works seamlessly across nodes is very nice, and exactly what I love to see from erlang.

The addition of Native Records [2] is really cool. I'm curious how this will be leveraged in Elixir in the future, since right now I think there is a mix of records, tuples, and maps depending on exactly what is being done. Like the EEP says, I doubt we'll ever see the old records deprecated entirely but this looks like a substantial improvement.

[0] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/ssh/ssh.html

[1] https://www.erlang.org/docs/29/apps/stdlib/io_ansi.html

[2] https://github.com/erlang/eep/pull/81

toast0 | 3 hours ago

I don't think the ssh daemon was ever automatically enabled or started. The two bullet points are phrased differently, but I think they mean the same thing, when starting the ssh daemon, the listed parts won't be started by default.

> The SSH daemon now defaults to disabled for shell and exec services, implementing the “secure by default” principle. This prevents authenticated users from executing arbitrary Erlang code unless explicitly configured.

> The SFTP subsystem is no longer enabled by default when starting an SSH daemon.

SteveGregory | 2 hours ago

Can someone please explain the innards?

Jtsummers | 2 hours ago

Innards of which part? The BEAM Book may be of interest to you:

https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/

tmoertel | 2 hours ago

For anyone wondering what the "OTP" part is in Erlang/OTP, it is a set of libraries and associated principles that, in effect, standardize the creation of highly reliable, fault-tolerant applications, originally for the telecom domain. It's worth checking out the brief introduction to the fundamental ideas in the introduction to "OTP Design Principles":

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

hackernudes | an hour ago

OTP = Open Telecom Platform

dnautics | 11 minutes ago

no longer. That is legacy. OTP now just stands for "OTP"

ch4s3 | an hour ago

I'm interested to see how records play out in the ecosystem.

sbrother | an hour ago

I was about to say "what, we've had records for decades" but then I read the changelog.

Interesting. I wonder if there a world where Elixir starts compiling maps to "native records"?

dnautics | 9 minutes ago

probably not maps, but structs yes.

keyle | an hour ago

      Added support for -unsafe attributes
Right in time for the Rust rewrite! /s
Does anyone knows if WhatsApp is still based on Erlang?