Elixir: Interoperability in 2025: beyond the Erlang VM

[NewsBot]

A new Elixir blog post/announcement has been posted!

The Erlang Virtual Machine has, historically, provided three main options for interoperability with other languages and ecosystems, with different degrees of isolation:

• NIFs (Native Implemented Functions) integrate with third party code in the same memory space via C bindings. This translates to low overhead and best performance but it also means faulty code can bring the whole Virtual Machine down, bypassing some of Erlang’s fault-tolerance guarantees

• Ports start a separate Operating System process to communicate with other languages through STDIN/STDOUT, guaranteeing process isolation. In a typical Erlang fashion, ports are fully evented, concurrent, and distributed (i.e. you can pass and communicate with ports across nodes)

• Distributed nodes rely on Erlang well-defined distribution and serialization protocol to communicate with other runtimes. Any language can implement said protocol and act as an Erlang node, giving you full node isolation between runtimes

Those mechanisms have led to multiple integrations between Elixir and other programming languages, such as Zig and Rust, and more recently C++, Python, and Swift, which we will explore here.

Furthermore, alternative implementations of the Erlang VM and Elixir have brought a fourth category of interoperability through portability: where your Elixir program runs in a completely different environment to leverage its native capabilities, libraries, and ecosystem, while maintaining Elixir’s syntax and semantics (either partially or fully). This opens up some exciting new possibilities and since this approach is still relatively uncharted territory, let’s dive into it first.

http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/08/18/interop-and-portability/