Strategy 1: Native Implemented Functions (NIFs)

What are NIFs?

Native implemented functions, or NIFs, allow developers to load external code into the same memory address space as the Erlang VM. Our code can integrate quite closely with functions implemented in other languages. While such tight integration may seem appealing because of the obvious performance benefits, we need to be careful. This power comes at a price. NIFs may be clean, but they do not necessarily share the same founding principles we do in ElixirLand. We must think of NIFs as unsafe. This is because of the following reasons: