There seem to be at least a few people looking to build NIFs in Rust, e.g. https://github.com/hansihe/Rustler (found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220615).

That looks really nice. Codegen + panic catchers makes is pretty compelling.

Hey, I'm one of those people!

And yes, I am doing this, and the personal reason is for fault-tolerance and the professional reason (or how I get time to do it) is based on security criteria.

Any idea if a network-level FFI has been started? I'm thinking along the lines of the Haskell erlang-ffi [0].

    Speaks the Erlang network protocol and impersonates 
    an Erlang node on the network. Fully capable of 
    bi-directional communication with Erlang.

NIFs still limit you to < ~1ms computations, from what I understand, but impersonating a node (on another machine, even) seems a lot more flexible. Just wondering; NIFs in Rust are still a great idea.

[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/erlang

Have you seen c nodes[1]? That may be what you're looking for?

[1] http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/cnode.html

There's support for "dirty NIFs" in new versions, R19 will make it the default. Dirty NIFs allow for long running NIFs managed by the VM. In older versions, you can use nif_create_thread to create background workers, and your NIF will only block for as long as it takes to acquire a lock for your queue.

You can also use c nodes (or the JVM interface, which is pretty similar to c nodes I think).

... You can also use ports which define an interface for communicating with external processes.

The world is your oyster!

Not anymore with dirty schedulers you will be able to (as of 19.0 I think) have any long running C code as a NIF!