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1 files changed, 53 insertions, 181 deletions
diff --git a/system/doc/top/highlights.xml b/system/doc/top/highlights.xml index a30742aed6..251bb1a47d 100644 --- a/system/doc/top/highlights.xml +++ b/system/doc/top/highlights.xml @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ <chapter> <header> <copyright> - <year>2006</year><year>2009</year> + <year>2006</year><year>2010</year> <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder> </copyright> <legalnotice> @@ -13,12 +13,12 @@ compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/. - + Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License. - + </legalnotice> <title>Highlights</title> @@ -28,133 +28,53 @@ <rev>A</rev> <file>highlights.xml</file> </header> - <p>This document lists some highlights of Erlang 5.7/OTP R13A - (unpatched), compared to the previous version Erlang 5.6/OTP R12B, - with focus on things not already released as R12B patches.</p> - <p>Note: This document was compiled at the time when R13A was released - and does not list any features introduced in R13 patches.</p> + <p>This document lists some highlights of Erlang 5.8/OTP R14A + (unpatched), compared to the previous version Erlang 5.7.1/OTP R13B, + with focus on things not already released as R13B patches.</p> + <p>Note: This document was compiled at the time when R14A was released + and does not list any features introduced in R14 patches.</p> <section> <title>Erlang Language and Run-time System</title> <section> - <title>Multi-core and SMP performance improvements</title> - <p> - There SMP performance is significantly improved and will - allow most applications to scale much better on systems with many - cores or processors. Listed below are some of the most important improvements: - </p> - <list type="bulleted"> - <item> - <p> - The runtime system with SMP support now uses <em>multiple, - scheduler specific run queues</em>, instead of one globally shared - run queue. - </p> - <p> - The lock protecting the shared run queue was heavily - contended, and the shared run queue also caused Erlang - processes to randomly migrate between schedulers with - negative cache effects as a result. - </p> - <p> - With the current scheduler specific run queue solution, lock - contention due to run queue protection has been reduced, and - Erlang processes are only migrated when needed to balance the - load between the schedulers. The reduced amount of migration - also reduce lock contention on locks protecting the scheduler - specific instances of the erts internal memory allocators. - </p> - <p> - The scheduler specific run queues are also a necessity for a - lot of future planned NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) - specific optimizations. - </p> - </item> - <item> - <p> - Message passing has been further optimized for parallell execution. - This makes parallell sending to one common receiver much more efficient. - </p> - </item> - <item> - <p> - Scheduler threads can now be bound to logical processors on newer - Linux ans Solaris systems. - </p> - </item> - </list> - </section> - <section> - <title>Unicode support</title> - <p> - Support for Unicode is implemented as described in EEP10. - Formatting and reading of unicode data both from terminals - and files is supported by the <c>io</c> and <c>io_lib</c> modules. - Files - can be opened in modes with automatic translation to and from - different unicode formats. The module 'unicode' contains - functions for conversion between external and internal - unicode formats and the re module has support for unicode - data. There is also language syntax for specifying string and - character data beyond the ISO-latin-1 range. - </p> - </section> + <title>New NIF features</title> + <list type="bulleted"> + <item><p>Send messages from a NIF, or from thread created by NIF, to + any local process (enif_send)</p></item> - <section> - <title>New BIF's</title> - <p> - The BIFs <c>atom_to_binary/2</c>, <c>binary_to_atom/2</c> and - <c>binary_to_existing_atom/2</c> have been added. - </p> - </section> - - <section> - <title>Independent Erlang clusters on the same host</title> - <p> - Nodes belonging to different independent clusters can now - co-exist on the same host with the help of a new - environment variable setting <c>ERL_EPMD_PORT</c>. - The environment variable is used by Erl_interface and J_interface - as well. - </p> - </section> - </section> + <item><p>Store terms between NIF calls (enif_alloc_env, + enif_make_copy)</p></item> - <section> - <title>New Applications</title> + <item><p>Create binary terms with user defined memory management + (enif_make_resource_binary)</p></item> + <item><p>Some incompatible changes made to the API. For more + information see the warning text in erl_nif(3).</p></item> + </list> + </section> <section> - <title>Reltool</title> - - <p> - Reltool is a release management tool. - It analyses a given Erlang/OTP installation and determines - various dependencies between applications. - The graphical frontend depicts the dependencies and enables - interactive customization of a target system. - The backend provides a batch interface for generation of - customized target systems. - The application is still somewhat limited and should be regarded - as experimental in this release. The intention is that this - application will be a valuable tool for making both traditional - Erlang target systems as well as standalone components in Erlang. - </p> + <title>Receive optimizations</title> + <p>Receive statements that can only read out a newly created + reference are now specially optimized so that it will execute + in constant time regardless of the number of messages in the + receive queue for the process. That optimization will benefit + calls to gen_server:call(). (See gen:do_call/4 for an example + of a receive statement that will be optimized.)</p> </section> - <section> - <title>WxErlang</title> - <p> - wxErlang is an Erlang binding to the WxWidgets GUI library which - provides support for cross platform GUI applications. - wxErlang is still in beta status and the intention is that it shall - replace GS in a later stage. The Erlang debugger is also shipped in - a wxErlang version. - </p> + <title>Improved eprof</title> + <p>eprof has been reimplemented with support in the Erlang + virtual machine and is now both faster (i.e. slows down the + code being measured less) and scales much better. In + measurements we saw speed-ups compared to the old eprof + ranging from 6 times (for sequential code that only uses one + scheduler/core) up to 84 times (for parallel code that uses 8 + cores).</p> + + <p>Note: The API for the eprof has been cleaned up and extended. + See the documentation.</p> </section> - - </section> - <section> <title>New features in Existing Applications</title> @@ -162,77 +82,29 @@ <title>Common_test</title> <p> - A support client module for SSH and SFTP, <c>ct_ssh</c>, has - been introduced. - </p> - <p> - Test case groups have been introduced. With this feature - it's possible to execute groups (possibly nested) - of test cases. + It is now possible for the user to provide specific callback + modules that handle test configuration data, so that data on + arbitray form can be accessed (e.g. by reading files or by + communicating with a configuration server process). Two + default callback modules have been introduced in Common Test: + ct_config_plain and ct_config_xml. The former is used to + handle the traditional Common Test configuration files (with + terms on key-value tuple form) and the latter to handle + configuration data on XML representation. </p> <p> - A group definition contains a name tag, a list of - properties and a list of test cases (including possible - nested group definitions). The properties make it possible - to execute test cases in parallel, in sequence and in - shuffled order. It is also possible to repeat test cases - according to different criteria. + The run_test script has been replaced by a program (with the + same name) which can be executed without explicit + installation. The start flags are the same as for the legacy + start script. </p> </section> - - <section> - <title>Dialyzer</title> - <p> - The analysis now accepts <em>opaque type declarations</em> and - detects - violations of opaqueness of terms of such types. Starting - with R13, many Erlang/OTP standard libraries (array, dict, - digraph, ets, gb_sets, gb_trees, queue, and sets) contain - opaque type declarations of their main data types. Dialyzer - will spit out warnings in code that explicitly depends on the - structure of these terms. - </p> - <p> - Added support for handling UTF segments in bitstreams and for - detecting obvious type errors in these segments. Warning: - This code is not terribly tested though since there are very - few Erlang programs which use Unicode-based binaries - not - surprising since this is a new language feature of R13. - </p> - <p> - Strengthened the discrepancy identification when testing for - equality and matching between terms of different types. This - detects more bugs in code. - </p> - <p> - See the Dialyzer documentation and release notes for even more - enhancements. - </p> - </section> - - <section> - <title>SSL</title> - <p> - The "new_ssl" implementation is significantly improved and should be - near product status now. - The new SSL is implemented in pure Erlang except for - the crypto routines that are implemented in the crypto driver which - is an interface to libcrypto from OpenSSL. - </p> - </section> - - <section> <title>STDLIB</title> - - <p>The Erlang scanner has been augmented as to return white-space, - comments and exact location of tokens. - This means that the scanner can easily be used in tools such as editors, - pretty printers, syntax highlighters etc. - where it is important to be able recreate the original source document. + <p> + The module binary from EEP31 (and EEP9) is implemented. </p> </section> - </section> </chapter> |