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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:47:02+00:00

I need an answer to the following question to help understand what approach I

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I need an answer to the following question to help understand what approach I should be taking to interface with Erlang. AFAIK Erlang on a SMP UNIX box uses the multi-process approach. In this case it should do same machine IPC.

  1. Does Erlang use UNIX domain sockets for UNIX ?

  2. Does it use named-pipes for windows ?

  3. If it does not implement both constructs above — i.e., no named-pipes for windows; it must have to fallback to sockets, on windows.

  4. How are the above mentioned principles implemented, do they use message oriented, single-thread per channel, asynchronous constructs or is it something else ?

  5. If my line of reasoning above is incorrect, does it use a master-child tree and all other processes communicate — indirectly — through the master ?

— edit 1 —

Link to the erlang binary format documentation.

The universal concensus is that Unix Domain Sockets outperform TCP/IP. I think I will try to extend Erlang to use the better primitives provided. I also strongly suspect that epol and windows IOPC is not used in the TCP/IP event loop — I will post back once I have audited the code.

Another SO post that asserts that Erlang indeed, does not support anything other than TCP and UDP.

There are two Erlang libraries for communication Erlang node -> c_node and c_node -> Erlang_node

The Erlang module for sockets allows Unix Dom Sockets to be opened under UNIX.

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  1. Editorial Team

    R1. It uses TCP/IP (in fact, there isn’t any “standard” support for UNIX domain sockets)

    R2. I am pretty sure it is still TCP/IP sockets

    R3. see R2

    R4. There is a binary exchange format proper to Erlang and it is message based. Exchanges can either be sync (RPC-like) or async.

    R5. No master.

    As bonus (to help you save time): don’t forget to use a registered name (-sname or -name) in order to use inter-node communications (either RPC or whatever).

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