[eoincathal]

There are libraries that allow C programs and Java programs to interact with Erlang as though they were Erlang processes. From the Erlang Interoperability guide: http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/overview.html#id61008

The team at Github took another approach, described here: https://github.com/blog/531-introducing-bert-and-bert-rpc It's an old article - so I no idea if it's still in use. The Github sources haven't been updated since 2010.

I don't know how effective it is to chuck around 8MB data structures via message-passing. I have no experience of this myself.

[pmarreck]

> I don't know how effective it is to chuck around 8MB data structures via message-passing.

It's my understanding that above a certain size and within the same running Erlang VM (machine), a reference is passed instead of a full copy.

[di4na]

only for binaries. But if your matrix is mainly modified outside of erlang, it may make sense to only use it as an opaque binary inside.