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R15B a new major release

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:29:10 GMT

Erlang/OTP R15B has been released as planned on December 14:th 2011.

See the release notes in the readme file.

Download the new release from the download page.

Highlights:

Line number and filename information are now included in exception backtraces. This information will be pretty-printed in the shell and used in crash reports etc. In practice it will be much easier to find where something failed.
The driver interface has been changed to enable 64-bit aware drivers. Most importantly the return types for ErlDrvEntry callbacks 'call' and 'control' has been changed which require drivers to be changed.
New in this release is the support for 64 bit Windows. The self extracting installer can be found here.
CommonTest hooks are now in a final supported version.
There is a new GUI tool in the observer application which integrates pman, etop, appmon and tv into one tool. The tool does also contain functions for activating tracing in an easy way.
The Erlang distribution can now be run over the new SSL implementation.

OTP_R15A: R15 pre-release

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:44:01 GMT

We have recently pushed a new master to GitHub tagged OTP_R15A.

This is a stabilized snapshot of the current R15 development (to be released as R15B on December 14:th) which, among other things, includes:

OTP-9468 'Line numbers in exceptions'

OTP-9451 'Parallel make'

OTP-4779 A new GUI for Observer. Integrating pman, etop and tv into
observer with tracing facilities.

OTP-7775 A number of memory allocation optimizations have been
implemented. Most optimizations reduce contention caused by
synchronization between threads during allocation and
deallocation of memory. Most notably:
Synchronization of memory management in scheduler specific
allocator instances has been rewritten to use lock-free
synchronization.

Synchronization of memory management in scheduler specific
pre-allocators has been rewritten to use lock-free
synchronization.

The 'mseg_alloc' memory segment allocator now use scheduler
specific instances instead of one instance. Apart from
reducing contention this also ensures that memory allocators
always create memory segments on the local NUMA node on a
NUMA system.

OTP-9632 An ERTS internal, generic, many to one, lock-free queue for
communication between threads has been introduced. The many
to one scenario is very common in ERTS, so it can be used in
a lot of places in the future. Currently it is used by
scheduling of certain jobs, and the async thread pool, but
more uses are planned for the future.

Drivers using the driver_async functionality are not
automatically locked to the system anymore, and can be
unloaded as any dynamically linked in driver.

Scheduling of ready async jobs is now also interleaved in
between other jobs. Previously all ready async jobs were
performed at once.

OTP-9631 The ERTS internal system block functionality has been
replaced by new functionality for blocking the system. The
old system block functionality had contention issues and
complexity issues. The new functionality piggy-backs on
thread progress tracking functionality needed by newly
introduced lock-free synchronization in the runtime system.
When the functionality for blocking the system isn't used,
there is more or less no overhead at all. This since the
functionality for tracking thread progress is there and
needed anyway.

... and much much more.

This is not a full release of R15 but rather a pre-release. Feel free to try our R15A release and get back to us with your findings.

Your feedback is important to us and highly welcomed.

Regards,

The OTP Team

R14B04 released

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:28:48 GMT

Erlang/OTP R14B04 has been released as planned on October 5:th 2011. It is the fourth R14 service release.

See the release notes in the readme file.

Download the new release from the download page.

This release is mainly a stabilization of the R14B03 release (but as
usual there are
some new functionality as well).

Erlang User of the Year 2011

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:15:53 GMT

Proposals for who will become Erlang User of the Year are invited. Please send proposed names with a short motivation to Bjarne D�cker bjarne[at]cs-lab.org.

The selection will be made by a panel consisting of Joe Armstrong (prime creator of Erlang), Kenneth Lundin (manager of the Erlang/OTP team at Ericsson), Ulf Wiger (chief technical officer at Erlang Solutions Ltd) and some of the last few years' recipients of the award. The award will be presented at the Erlang User Conference in Stockholm on 3 November. In 2010 it was awarded to Kresten Krab Thorup at Trifork for his development of Erjang.

Erlang User Conference 2011

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:44:46 GMT

Erlang User Conference 2011.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the 2011 Erlang User Conference in Stockholm. The date for your diary is 3 November 2011. Early Bird registration will open on 15 August so in the meantime if you wish to submit a talk, we would love to hear from you.

After the success of last year's Conference and it selling out, you will want to book your place early. The Erlang User Conference brings together the best minds and names in Erlang programming from language inventors, implementers and maintainers. Open source committers, community leaders and Erlang authors. Everyone who is anyone will be at the Erlang User Conference 2011!