Shameless plug: there is a small Python library called erlastic that handles the conversion between Erlang’s and Python’s internal encoding of strings, numbers, objects etc. It’s not mine but I maintain a fork here which AFAIK is the most up-to-date version. I’ve been using this thing with ports for years – I outsource numerical computation jobs to Python scripts, and it works great.

This is a great article showing exactly what it means to use ports to connect Elixir & Python (for a different use case): https://www.poeticoding.com/real-time-object-detection-with-phoenix-and-python/

You can use regular ports (Erlport is just wrapper on top of that) or C-Nodes.

Sorry, good question! I should put it on PyPi. You should be able to install it directly from Github though; I simply use pip3 install git+https://github.com/skosch/python-erlastic.

I believe so - a single Elixir process can control multiple ports, and you can obviously also have multiple processes controlling one or more ports.

Also, another article that is worth reading is https://www.theerlangelist.com/article/outside_elixir