=== SMP Support ===
The major news is the support for SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing).
SMP is supported by most modern operating systems like Linux, Windows, Mac OSx,
Solaris and is becoming more important now when dual processors,
hyper-threading technology and multi-core systems are a reality.
With Erlang, most of the problems which occur in multi-threaded programs have
been solved once and for all in the Erlang VM and do not have to be handled by
the application programmers.
In the SMP version of the Erlang virtual machine, there can be many process
schedulers running in separate OS threads. As default there will be as many
schedulers as there are processors or processor cores on the system.
The SMP support is totally transparent for the Erlang programs. That is, there
is no need to change or recompile existing programs. Programs with built-in
assumptions about sequential execution must be rewritten in order to take
advantage of the SMP support, however.
In this release, the Erlang VM supports SMP with focus on stability. There will
follow a number of subsequent steps with necessary optimizations and support
for more platforms.
=== Erlang Language and Related Issues ===
* The andalso and orelse operators are now allowed to be used in guards.
That also applies to match specifications.
* The BIF is_record/3 can now be used in guards. Also, is_record/3 can now
be called without an erlang: module prefix for consistency with the other
is_* functions.
* The compiler options ignore_try and ignore_cond, which allowed code that
used unquoted try or cond as atoms or record tags, has been removed. Old
code that depended on the options need to be revised to have occurrences
of try or cond as atom or record tags single-quoted. (Note: Although cond
is a reserved keyword, there is no cond statement. It might be introduced
in a future release.)
* (ERTS 5.4.8) The new fun M:F/A construct creates a fun that refers to the
latest version of M:F/A. This syntax is meant to replace tuple funs {M,F}
which have many problems.
* (ERTS 5.4.8) The new type test is_function(Fun, Arity) -- which may be
used in guards -- test whether Fun is a fun that can be applied to Arity
arguments.
=== New Applications ===
Dialyzer
Dialyzer is a static analysis tool that identifies software discrepancies such
as type errors, unreachable code, unnecessary tests, etc in single Erlang
modules or entire (sets of) applications.
Inviso
The Inviso application, together with some new extensions to Runtime_Tools, is
aimed at providing features for efficient tracing of production Erlang/OTP
systems:
* Distributed tracing - tracing on any number of Erlang nodes.
* Autostart - tracing during system start-up.
* Overload protection - mechanisms for suspending and later reactivating
tracing, should an overload situation occur.
* Enhanced use of meta tracing.
* Trace cases - predefined specifications of what to trace.
* Off-line merging and formatting of log files.
Inviso is still under development. An easier-to-use trace tool, using the
features listed above, is planned to be released as an R11B patch in Q3/Q4
2006.
SSH
The SSH application is an Erlang implementation of the secure shell protocol.
It is considered to be a beta release, meaning there can be changes made to the
API before it reaches 1.0.
=== Existing Applications ===
Compiler
(Compiler 4.3.6) It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in Beam
files.
Debugger
(Debugger 2.0) The debugger can now handle the try/catch language construct.
Inets
The Erlang implementation of the TFTP procotcol, tftp, is now documented.
Kernel
In Kernel 2.10.X, several bug fixes and improvements have been made in global ,
the global name registration facility.
OS_Mon
(OS_Mon 2.0) The entire OS_Mon application (code and documentation) has been
reviewed and consequently updated with the goal to make the application more
robust, homogeneous and easier to configure.
STDLIB
Added the zip module with functions for reading and creating zip archives.
systems, but the code that take care of them is inly implemented
on Linux. This made the build go into an infinite loop on NetBSD.
Disable floating point exceptions on NetBSD/amd64 for now, until
I get around implementing and testing the necessary sigaction glue.
been updated in more than two years.)
- Add a buildlink3.mk file.
- Make the Java dependency optional, and disable this option by default (this
will make erlang build in more bulk builds).
Ok by wiz.
This version is focused on improved performance and stability,
rather than introducing new functionality, hence it is called R9C.
Build Process NEW
The build process has been improved so that it is possible to build
Erlang/OTP from source even on Windows platforms. There is also a
completely new installation program for Windows.
Observer
crashdump_viewer NEW
A HTML based tool for browsing Erlang crashdumps. The tool can handle
crashdumps from OTP R7B, R8B and R9B as well but there is additional
information in the crashdumps for R9C.
OTP_MIBs NEW
The OTP mibs that where included in the SASL application have been
moved to this new application otp_mibs. This is a step too create a
pure core for Erlang/OTP that does not depend on specific,
non-mainstream applications such as SNMP.
Erlang is a programming language which has many features more commonly
associated with an operating system than with a programming language:
concurrent processes, scheduling, memory management, distribution,
networking, etc.
The initial open-source Erlang release contains the implementation of
Erlang, as well as a large part of Ericsson's middleware for building
distributed high-availability systems.
