Can someone please explain the innards?
Innards of which part? The BEAM Book may be of interest to you:
Looks like a nice set of improvements. Disabling the SSH daemon [0] by default is a good security change, same with disabling the SFTP by default.
I think the io_ansi [1] module sounds pretty cool, imo erlang doesn't have a great story for building complicated CLI applications right now, but I haven't tried much. I imagine having this in the stdlib will be a nice leg up in the future. The way fwrite works seamlessly across nodes is very nice, and exactly what I love to see from erlang.
The addition of Native Records [2] is really cool. I'm curious how this will be leveraged in Elixir in the future, since right now I think there is a mix of records, tuples, and maps depending on exactly what is being done. Like the EEP says, I doubt we'll ever see the old records deprecated entirely but this looks like a substantial improvement.
[0] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/ssh/ssh.html
I don't think the ssh daemon was ever automatically enabled or started. The two bullet points are phrased differently, but I think they mean the same thing, when starting the ssh daemon, the listed parts won't be started by default.
> The SSH daemon now defaults to disabled for shell and exec services, implementing the “secure by default” principle. This prevents authenticated users from executing arbitrary Erlang code unless explicitly configured.
> The SFTP subsystem is no longer enabled by default when starting an SSH daemon.