Kinda hilarious since we've had completely isolated ports for a loooong time. For non-data-intensive tasks, don't underestimate how fast speaking erl_interface over a unix pipe can be. Plus, free isolation, free fault tolerance and free supervision restarting without any networking required.
http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/ports.html (15.1)
Here's one of my old examples (no guarantees to its current effectiveness or correctness): https://github.com/mattsta/libgeoip-erlang/blob/master/c_src... — then the whole thing is opened and run from Erlang like https://github.com/mattsta/libgeoip-erlang/blob/70b58ef5ef8a...
It's just cleaner to stay outside direct VM linkage as much as possible.