NIFs are great - sometimes… Except, when a NIF has a bug, it can crash your entire BEAM node! Code running inside of a NIF does not provide the same safety guarantees that the BEAM gives.

But… what if it could?

Introducing SafeNIF: https://github.com/probably-not/safe-nif

SafeNIF allows you to wrap your NIFs to run on an isolated peer node raised on the same machine. If the NIF crashes, only this peer node dies. The guarantees of the BEAM continue, and you get fault tolerance and crash isolation, even for NIFs, all in native Elixir (with a touch of Erlang’s standard library).