Hello and welcome to another “This week in Erlang” newsletter! This week your humble editor is Mark Allen (@bytemeorg).
Community Announcement
Mariano Guerra released the first ever “State of BEAM” survey last week, I wanted to remind you (a final time) to fill it if you have forgotten. Please share this survey with your network.
http://bit.ly/state-of-beam-2017
Articles and Blog posts
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Fred Hebert wrote a whole website devoted to property based testing. In this style of testing, you do not write unit tests. Instead you write an invariant set of properties about your code and the testing framework will generate inputs to see if your property/invariant holds. This website focuses on the PropEr project style of syntax.
Read more here: http://propertesting.com
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Quite a vigorous discussion this week on the erlang-questions mailing list about reimplementing the BEAM VM in Rust language.
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Julia Evans (@b0rk) wrote an interesting blog post last year about investigating Erlang by reading its system calls. https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/05/13/erlang-seems-really-complicated/
Library updates
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Django style template library erlyDTL is looking for a new library maintainer. Maybe it’s you?
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exometer_core 1.5.0 was released and moved meck to its test profile. One less way to be infected with meck hell. https://github.com/Feuerlabs/exometer_core/tree/1.5.0
OTP Updates
OTP 20.0.5 was released this week. Did you know you can use kerl to
build minor patch releases like this? You can! Set the shell variable
KERL_BUILD_BACKEND=git to enable using git tags for builds.
Library of the week
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This week’s library is a NIF for Google’s snappy compression library. Snappy provides compression that’s about 20% larger than zlib at about 100x the speed.
You can also use the snzip project if you need a command line tool to (de)compress Snappy archives. (On a Mac w/ homebrew try:
brew install snzip)
Feeds
- If you didn’t know there is an Atom feed of this newsletter here: https://gootik.github.io/this-week-in-erlang/feed.xml