I am super-stoked about the potential of Rust and Elixir, but there are some definite gotchas to be aware of. Especially if your Rust code is pretty expensive. Sonny Scroggin's talk about Rustler is really informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSLTwWqTbKQ

Have you written any Rust NIFs? What's the dev experience like?

Yes, I have. I would say it's pretty easy. Had it not been for rustler I wouldn't have touched NIFs since I'm not a C programmer. Also, rustler supplies elegant building blocks, which makes it a straightforward experience.

I've had a few issues with the version of rustler published on hex.pm not working with Erlang/OTP 20, and I've tried using the master repo as a dependency in my `mix.exs`, but that didn't work since rustler repo has an unusual directory structure which fails to compile. And then lo and behold, I've discovered how amazing the `mix` tool is and via `mix help deps` I've learned that you can actually check out a specific directory (via `sparse` option) from a remote repo as your dependency.

Now my dependency listed in `mix.exs` looks like this:

    {:rustler, ">= 0.0.0", git: "https://github.com/hansihe/rustler.git",
                            tag: "0.15.1", sparse: "rustler_mix"}

... and problem solved. I guess peeking at rustler's tests helped me a lot.

All in all, the entire Elixir ecosystem is really elegant. Such a joy to write code now!

Oh cool, that's a great mix find.

With the Rustler Rust library, almost blissfully easy. I highly recommend it.

I'll have to hit you up for advice on the forum when I try it out.