Erlang/OTP R16A has been released

http://www.erlang.org/news/41

by rlander • 13 years ago

84 27 13 years ago

Xurinos• 13 years ago

Is there a convenient list that I can read that shows what feature changes have been introduced to Erlang in the last 10 years?

chops3• 13 years ago

As far as I know, there isn't.

This particular question highlights a shortcoming of long-form changelogs though. It would be nice if there was a way to have community-voted highlighting of a changelog pointing out the significance of each line-item of a changelog.

http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/changelog-voting (Blog post inspired by this question)

jlouis3• 13 years ago

Your best bet is to grab the README files from

http://www.erlang.org/download/

which tells you part of the story.

chrisduesing2• 13 years ago

"Support for parameterized modules (but an alternative solution provides) and packages removed"

That is kind of huge, guess it is time to go catch up on the mailing list...

chops3• 13 years ago

The pmod arguments have been a pretty ongoing war[1] on the mailing list, especially since it was announced R16 would be removing official support for them.

With ChicagoBoss being one of the highest profile projects to use pmods extensively, Evan Miller has been arguing for them pretty extensively.

At least support wasn't completely dropped, since they are providing the parse_transform to re-enable the functionality:

https://github.com/erlang/pmod_transform

[1] A friendly war, anyway: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...

codewright3• 13 years ago

The fact that people like Evan Miller aren't taken seriously and heeded is why I only tinker with Erlang and haven't bothered to use it for anything.

Once they start taking the little people (so to speak) seriously, I'll revisit the Erlang runtime for an actual project.

Until then: Clojure.

Clojure has a strong tinkerer culture.

vladev• 13 years ago

From the release announcement on the mailing list:

Some of the highlights are:

* Optimized handling of processes in the VM

* New internal process table allowing for parallel reads and writes

- optimized run queue management

- optimized process state changes

* "Non-blocking" code loading

* New internal port table, and rewrite of scheduling of port tasks.

* Dynamic allocation of port structures, allowing the default for maximum ports to be raised to 65536 (from 1024) Support for UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters in source files.

* Inets application: The http client now support HTTPS through a proxy

* Asn1 application: Major cleanup of back ends and optimizations of mainly decode for PER and UPER.

* The experimental features parameterized modules and packages are removed. An alternative compatible solution for parameterized modules is provided here https://github.com/erlang/pmod_transform.

* All built in functions BIF's (even if they are implemented in C as part of the VM) are now visible in the source code of the module they belong to, including their type specs.

* The Wx application now compiles and is usable with the unstable development branch of wxWidgets-2.9. This means that wx can now be built on 64 bit MacOsX as well.

You can find the README file with more detailed info at http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R16A_RELEASE_CANDIDAT...

olgeni• 13 years ago

We also get a brand new man(7) section :)

chops3• 13 years ago

For those new to Erlang conventions, the "A" in the release number is an indicator that this is a beta release. The stable releases are the "B" branches. So in this case, R16B will be the stable version.

Erlang/OTP R16A has been released

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