How does erlang serialize data to disk?

Question

Erlang does not have fixed sized integers such as 32-bit or 64-bit sized. What is the library call to write say an integer to disk in a binary representation? And what is that binary representation?

More generally what is the disk binary representation for some arbitrary data structure?

Answer 1

You can serialize any erlang data structure using term_to_binary function. Your data will be serialized into erlang external term format.

Please look at http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html

and then, write to disk using file:write_file function http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/file.html#write_file-2