The Nifty way to call hell from heaven.

ABSTRACT Often Erlang programmers want or need to use existing C libraries. Also, occasionally they have good reasons to implement parts of their applications directly in C. To cater for such situations, the Erlang/OTP system comes with various mechanisms to call C from Erlang. The most modern of them allows to call C functions from Erlang as natively implemented functions (NIFs). Unfortunately, the use of a NIF library currently requires writing by hand a fair amount of code that to a large extent is boilerplate. To ease the lives of Erlang programmers and simplify the task of using existing C code bases from Erlang, we have created Nifty, a tool that automates the process of creating NIF libraries from C header files containing declarations of types and functions that the library supplies. This paper describes the functionality and implementation of Nifty, its current limitations and our experiences with it so far.