Mailboxer: Early Detection of Erlang Communication Errors

This conference talk recorded at Code BEAM Europe in October 2024 introduces Mailboxer, a groundbreaking static communication checking tool for Erlang codebases. Discover how Mailboxer allows developers to annotate code with expected message types to detect communication errors early in the development process, including unreceived messages, deadlocks, protocol violations, and typos in message tags. Learn about the advantages of Mailboxer's approach to checking idiomatic mailbox communication compared to existing session type checkers that enforce channel-based communication. While currently targeting Erlang, understand how the underlying type theory and checking technology can be applied to other actor languages with mailboxes such as Elixir and Scala/Akka. Explore how Erlang is pioneering as the first production language to implement this innovative communication-checking approach that can significantly reduce debugging and development times.