Elixir is a great choice for most applications. It's powered by the battle-tested Erlang VM know as the BEAM. It allows programmers to build incredibly fast, efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant distributed systems. As it turns out, Elixir isn't the fastest kid on the block. And while raw CPU speed matters little for most applications, there does exist a couple reasons you might want want to reach for tools that give you access to native power. In this talk we're going to discuss Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) - Erlang's Foreign Function Interface (FFI). NIFs are normally implemented in C and are considered dangerous. But we're going explore writing safer NIFs in Rust - a new systems programming language developed by Mozilla, that focuses on memory safety. We'll talk about the pitfalls with writing NIFs and how Rust can make this process easier and safer.