What are records in Erlang?

A record is a compile-time convenience for naming the fields of a tuple, so you write Person#person.name instead of remembering that the name sits at tuple position 2. Under the hood a record is still a plain tuple with the record name as its first element.

-record(person, {name, age = 0}).

P = #person{name = "Ada", age = 34},
Age = P#person.age.

Records are defined with -record(Name, {Field1, Field2 = Default, ...}), usually in a header file so multiple modules can share the definition. Because they compile down to tuple access, using records costs nothing at runtime over a raw tuple — the benefit is purely readability and safer field access at compile time.

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