rusterlium/rustler
Rustler
Rustler is a native function wrapper and foreign function interface that enables the development of high-performance extensions for the BEAM virtual machine. It serves as a bridge for writing native functions in Rust that can be called from Erlang environments.
The project focuses on maintaining memory safety to prevent system crashes and memory corruption when executing compiled code. It achieves this by wrapping native calls in safe abstractions and applying Rust's ownership and borrowing rules to the management of external memory and structured data objects.
The library provides mechanisms for data conversion between language types and the management of resource objects. These capabilities allow for the passing of references to structured data into external code with automatic memory release via the runtime garbage collector.
Features
- Native Function Invocations - Provides the primary capability to invoke high-performance native Rust functions from a managed Erlang runtime.
- Trait-Based Term Conversions - Uses Rust traits to provide a shared interface for encoding and decoding data types between Rust and the Erlang Term Format.
- Language Interoperability Converters - Encodes and decodes values between Rust and Erlang types to ensure data compatibility across the FFI bridge.
- BEAM NIF Bridges - Serves as a specialized bridge for integrating native Rust functions into the BEAM virtual machine environment.
- Erlang NIF Development - Provides the essential tooling and safety abstractions for developing Native Implemented Functions for the Erlang VM using Rust.
- Native Function Dispatchers - Implements a high-performance NIF-based dispatch mechanism to execute native Rust functions within the BEAM virtual machine.
- Native Runtime Wrappers - Acts as a safety layer handling memory management and data conversion for native Rust code in Erlang environments.
- Rust-Erlang Integration - Facilitates the exchange and conversion of data types to combine Rust's systems programming with Erlang's actor model.
- Rust Native Extensions - Enables the creation of high-performance native extensions for the BEAM VM while preventing memory corruption.
- Safe Pointer Abstractions - Encapsulates unsafe native calls in safe Rust abstractions to prevent memory corruption and segmentation faults.
- Reference-Counting Garbage Collectors - Uses reference counting to track external memory allocations and ensure automatic cleanup by the runtime garbage collector.
- Native Memory Lifecycle Management - Implements automated memory management for native objects shared between Rust and Erlang processes.
- Resource Handles - Manages resource objects by passing references to structured data into external code with automatic memory release.
- Foreign Function Interface - Bridge for creating Erlang NIF functions in Rust.
