Erlang/OTP 28 Highlights

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A new Erlang blog post/announcement has been posted!

Erlang/OTP 28 is finally here. This blog post will introduce the new features that we are most excited about.

A list of all changes is found in Erlang/OTP 28 Readme. Or, as always, look at the release notes of the application you are interested in. For instance: Erlang/OTP 28 - Erts Release Notes - Version 16.0.

This year’s highlights mentioned in this blog post are:

• Priority Messages
• Improvements of Comprehensions
• Smarter Error Suggestions
• Improvements to the Shell
• New erlang:hibernate/0
• Warnings for Use of Old-style Catch
• PCRE2
• Optimizations to TLS 1.3
• Based Floating Point Literals
• Nominal Types
• New Emacs Erlang Mode

Priority Messages

Sometimes, it is important for urgent messages to skip the queue and be read by the receiving process as soon as possible. Erlang/OTP 28 introduces priority messages, an opt-in mechanism that allows the receiving process to let certain messages get priority status.

By default, all messages are inserted to the end of the message queue of a process. This can become cumbersome when the queue is long. An urgent message may need to be read as soon as possible.

For example, the current message overload protection mechanism for https://www.erlang.org/blog/highlights-otp-28/