ElixirConf 2021 - Isaac Yonemoto - Zig (heart) Elixir
ElixirConf 2021 - Isaac Yonemoto - Zig (heart) Elixir on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2021–2025.
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.
What HN commenters said
6 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
kristoff_itOct 2024Recommends
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: ▶ this video
in “Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir” · View on HN
brightballNov 2021Recommends
Really fascinating to see Zig being used to make Elixir cross platform! Exciting stuff. Here's a direct link to the ElixirConf talk: ▶ this video
in “Zig monthly, October 2021: Games, gamedev, Elixir, tools and more” · View on HN
dnauticsJul 2025Cites it
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: ▶ this 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?
in “Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate” · View on HN
dnauticsJul 2025Cites it
RE: Elixir I have a feeling that the zig's i/o strategy will enable me to bring back the zig-async-dependent yielding nifs in zigler. I'm really hopeful io interface will have a yield() function, that would be even better! ▶ this video
in “Resizable structs in Zig” · View on HN
h0l0cubeOct 2024Cites it
Links for anyone curious. > Syntax highlighting here can work correctly, actually. Highlighting shown here in the 2021 ElixirConf talk posted elsewhere in the comments: ▶ this video > I'm not sure why it's not better documented in Zigler Here's the docs for it (though buried in the 'advanced' section) [link]
in “Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir” · View on HN
throwawaymathsApr 2023Cites it
Got it. Thank you for your perspective. I can appreciate that comptime is tricky. Indeed, async zig is hard and annoying (but you're wrong about the function coloring... Here is someone's project where they call an async function alternately from a sync or async context with zero lines of code: ▶ this video Yielding is async and threaded is sync)
in “The two types of C programmers (a provocative thesis)” · View on HN