v1.0.0

Hello! Popcorn reached another milestone, which is:

🥁🥁🥁

OTP/BEAM support!

The full blog post explaining why we did such a move and how it works now can be found here.

In the meantime...

Added features

• Popcorn now runs on OTP/BEAM (OTP 29.0.6, Elixir 1.20.4).
  • You can pass custom environment variables, options, and flags.
  • Use schedulers() to set scheduler counts. We use one scheduler of each type by default.
• async send() in JS sends messages to VM processes; trySend() returns a result object.
• Req adapter using browser fetch() for HTTP requests from Elixir.
• We now support interactive terminal I/O through writeStdin() and resizeTty().
• Popcorn.JS.available?/0 was added to detect if we're running in the browser.
• The bridge supports atoms, tuples, PID handles, binaries, BigInt, Date, Map, and Set.

Changed features

• Popcorn.Wasm is now Popcorn.JS; run_js() and run_js!() are now run() and run!(). JS functions receive (args, actions) and return values directly.
• async call() in JS has a tryCall() variant.
• cast() in JS is now asynchronous and has a tryCast() variant.
• call() and cast() are now forwarded through Popcorn.Proxy to GenServers. The proxy starts automatically under the :popcorn application.
• onMessage() in JS is now onEvent(). Send events with Popcorn.JS.send/1; the callback receives a single value.
• PopcornInternalError and error codes are now PopcornError. We use structured errors, with t (type) and data fields.
• JS try* methods return result objects ({ok: true, data} | {ok: false, error}). Other fallible methods throw or reject on failure.
• %Popcorn.TrackedObject{} is replaced by handles from new TrackedValue(value, cleanup), with optional cleanup functions.
• Applications now ship as tarballs instead of .avm bundles.
• The VM now runs in Web Workers instead of an iframe plus Web Workers. JS interop runs in the page.

Removed features

• AtomVM is now unsupported.
• registerLogListener() and unregisterLogListener() were removed. Dispatch logs through onStdout and onStderr callbacks.
• heartbeatTimeoutMs and onReload were removed. Use the onError callback to observe VM failures.
• durationMs field in responses.
• Wasm.ready/0,1. We now use the normal OTP application lifecycle.
• Wasm.get_tracked_values/1 and Wasm.get_tracked_values!/1. Pass handles into Popcorn.JS.run/3 to access their values.
• Wasm.register_event_listener/2 and Wasm.unregister_event_listener/1. Use addEventListener() and removeEventListener() inside Popcorn.JS.run/3.¹

Others

• Popcorn's landing page was redesigned!
• Docs are much better now and contain tutorials for starting with Popcorn

See the migration guide and documentation.

1. Use a tracked value with a cleanup callback to remove the listener when its handle is released. Call cleanup explicitly when timing matters. ↩