Did the WhatsApp patches mentioned in a 2014 conference make it into mainstream Erlang?

dowusu · January 20, 2022, 9:14am

Hi Folks,
I stumbled across an Erlang factory 2014 conference where the speaker was from WhatsApp.
He suggested a number of patches they applied to the BEAM etc.
I want to find out if these patches found their way to mainstream Erlang or they are exclusive to WhatsApp.
Thank you.

AstonJ · January 20, 2022, 1:43pm

Do you have a link to the video @dowusu?

dowusu · January 20, 2022, 1:44pm

starbelly · January 20, 2022, 3:11pm

@max-au would know at least some.

max-au · January 20, 2022, 4:50pm

I briefly talked on that in Nov 2021 CodeBEAM talk. WhatsApp no longer uses “special OTP 16 version”. Some changes mentioned in the talk were contributed:

pg2 - after patching it to no avail, I came up with a completely different implementation, pg
different ETS/phash2 hash salt (slide on 24:40) contributed

The rest were obsoleted by OTP improvements, like NIF for file I/O, off-heap message queues, improved ETS table scalability.

There are two more I haven’t had enough time to contribute. Help is appreciated.