Supressing nif load errors

[frekw]

Hi!

Just having spent some time trying to understand why snappy-erlang-nif failed to load on my production system, could I suggest either removing the catch here: https://github.com/fdmanana/snappy-erlang-nif/blob/master/src/snappy.erl#L36 or making it optional? :)

Unfortunately, my Erlang chops are a pretty much non-existant, otherwise I'd send a pull request.

Best,
Fredrik

[dch]

The catch is supposed to be there - if your NIF isn't compiled correctly, or not available, and you are including/using the library module in your code, you want this to fail. Or have I missed something?

[frekw]

Yes, but the catch silences the failure to load the NIF. So during application start it appears as if everything has loaded properly but all calls fail with snappy_nif_not_loaded and you don't get any indication as to why.

[dch]

@frekw the try/catch is in place because this code was originally written when not all versions of erlang could support NIFs, and the parent library then would need to handle it. I think now we can safely remove this check completely.