Rustler: Bridging Elixir and Rust with Sonny Scroggin

Rustler Core Team Member Sonny Scroggin joins Elixir Wizards Sundi Myint and Charles Suggs. Rustler serves as a bridge to write Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) in Rust that can be called from Elixir code. This combo leverages Rust's performance and memory safety while maintaining Elixir's fault tolerance and concurrency model, creating a powerful solution for CPU-intensive operations within Elixir applications. Sonny provides guidance on when developers should consider using NIFs versus other approaches like ports or external services and highlights the considerations needed when stepping outside Elixir's standard execution model into native code. Looking toward the future, Sonny discusses exciting developments for Rustler, including an improved asynchronous NIF interface, API modernization efforts, and better tooling. While Rust offers tremendous performance benefits for specific use cases, Sonny emphasizes that Elixir's dynamic nature and the BEAM's capabilities for distributed systems remain unmatched for many applications. Rustler simply provides another powerful tool that expands what developers can accomplish within the Elixir ecosystem. Key topics discussed in this episode: Rust as a "high-level low-level language" with memory safety NIFs (Native Implemented Functions) in the BEAM virtual machine Rustler's role simplifying Rust-Elixir integration with macros CPU-intensive operations as primary NIF use cases Beam scheduler interaction considerations with native code Dirty schedulers for longer-running NIFs in OTP 20+ Memory safety advantages of Rust for NIFs Development workflow using Mix tasks for Rustler Common pitfalls when first working with Rust Error handling improvements possible with Rustler NIFs Differences between ports, NIFs, and external services Asynchronous programming approaches in Rust versus Elixir Tokyo runtime integration for asynchronous operations Static NIFs for mobile device compatibility Upcoming CLI tooling to simplify Rustler development Rustler's API modernization efforts for better ergonomics Thread pool sharing across multiple NIFs Wasm integration possibilities for the BEAM Compile-time safety versus dynamic runtime capabilities Performance considerations when implementing NIFs Compiler-assisted memory management in Rust Automatic encoding/decoding between Rust and Elixir types The importance of proper error handling Real-world application in high-traffic authentication servers Community resources for learning Rustler Links mentioned: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler https://github.com/rust-lang/rust https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites https://www.php.net/ https://xmpp.org/ https://jabberd2.org/ Geocities: https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/ (fun fact: when you search Geocities on Google, the results page is in Comic Sans font.) https://bleacherreport.com/ https://hexdocs.pm/jose/readme.html https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen Erlang Ports: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/c_port.html Erlang ETFs (External Term Format): https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html Elixir gRPC https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc gRPC (“Remote Proceduce Call”): https://grpc.io/ dirty_cpu.ex https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler/blob/main/lib/zig/nif/dirty_cpu.ex ets https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/ets.html Mnesia https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/mnesia.html VPPs (Virtual Power Plants): https://www.energy.gov/lpo/virtual-power-plants https://nixos.org/ WASM WebAssembly with Elixir: https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Orb Rust Tokio https://tokio.rs/ Getting Started: https://hexdocs.pm/rustler/0.17.0/Mix.Tasks.Rustler.New.html https://rustup.rs/Special Guest: Sonny Scroggin.