Lately I have been spending some time at the Hackheim hackerspace in Trondheim. Although being located at the back of a bar and arcade is really cool, looking around and seeing projects like the Flaschen Taschen made us feel slightly insecure about our digital signeage situation. Things needed to be set right, and we decided to outdo them. After thinking it through, we snapped back to reality, and decided to just make a really nice LED-lit sign instead.

In this article we look at a completely reckless and unsafe (but fun) way to work around some of the issues with running native code from Erlang. This involves allocating a new C stack and switching to it, then interrupting execution when a certain amount of time has passed and switching back to the original thread, for then to resume execution where we left off later at a later point in time.

Note that is is purely done for fun, is completely nonportable, and does quite a few things that could crash or deadlock the Erlang VM if you so much as look at it the wrong way. What’s not to love :)