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diff --git a/system/doc/top/highlights.xml b/system/doc/top/highlights.xml new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..a30742aed6 --- /dev/null +++ b/system/doc/top/highlights.xml @@ -0,0 +1,238 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="latin1" ?> +<!DOCTYPE chapter SYSTEM "chapter.dtd"> + +<chapter> + <header> + <copyright> + <year>2006</year><year>2009</year> + <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder> + </copyright> + <legalnotice> + The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License, + Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in + 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> + <prepared></prepared> + <docno></docno> + <date></date> + <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> + + <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> + + <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> + + <section> + <title>New Applications</title> + + <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> + </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> + </section> + + + </section> + + <section> + <title>New features in Existing Applications</title> + + <section> + <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. + </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. + </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> + </section> + + </section> +</chapter> + |