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Erlang / Erlang Basics Interview questions

What are ports in Erlang?

A port is Erlang's built-in mechanism for talking to an external OS process or native code, treated from the Erlang side just like another process you can send messages to and receive messages from. It's the standard, safe way to shell out to a C program, a script, or any external executable.

Port = open_port({spawn, "sort"}, [binary]),
Port ! {self(), {command, <<"banana\napple\n">>}}.

Communication happens over the external program's standard input/output, with Erlang handling the byte framing. Crucially, if the external program crashes, only the port dies — it cannot corrupt or crash the BEAM itself, which is what makes ports a safer integration point than loading foreign code directly in-process.

What does an Erlang port primarily let you do?
What happens to the BEAM if the external program behind a port crashes?

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More Related questions...

What is Erlang? What is the BEAM virtual machine? What are processes in Erlang? What is the actor model in Erlang? What are atoms in Erlang? What are tuples in Erlang? What are lists in Erlang? What is pattern matching in Erlang? Define immutability in Erlang? What is a PID? What is a module in Erlang? What are guards used for in Erlang? What is OTP? What is a gen_server? What is a supervisor? Describe the "let it crash" philosophy? What are records in Erlang? What is message passing? What is hot code loading? What are binaries/bitstrings in Erlang? What is ETS? What is Mnesia? What are list comprehensions? What is a behavior in Erlang? What are ports in Erlang? What is a NIF (Native Implemented Function)? How do you spawn a process in Erlang? How does Erlang achieve concurrency without shared memory? What is the difference between spawn and spawn_link? What is the difference between a list and a tuple? Why is Erlang considered fault-tolerant? How does pattern matching differ from equality comparison? When should you use ETS instead of process state? How do you handle errors in Erlang without try/catch? Why doesn't Erlang have mutable variables? What is the difference between gen_server and gen_statem? How do you implement a simple supervision tree? What happens when a linked process crashes? When would you choose Mnesia over ETS? How do you use the observer tool to inspect a running system? Explain the execution flow of a gen_server call? Explain the internal working of the BEAM scheduler? How can you optimize message passing between heavy processes? Explain the lifecycle of a supervised process? How do you troubleshoot process mailbox overflow? What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous message passing in OTP? Which is better for state management, ETS or process dictionaries, and why? How does distributed Erlang handle node failures?
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