Erlang Scripts/Binaries.

Tobbe tobbe@REDACTED
Fri Dec 18 23:40:29 CET 1998


> I've been wondering how one can make Erlang scripts/binaries?
> Something that can be then run as
> ./someprog

Dan Sahlin once wrote a little thing to accomplish this (hello
Dan where are you ?).

You also have the 'erl_call' command which is intended to be
used from shell scripts. It makes it possible to start/stop
Erlang, evaluate one/many functions etc. Whatever the Erlang
function in question returns is also returned from erl_call. 
Run: erl_call without any switches and a short help with all 
the switches is printed. 

Exampel:

 erl_call -s -a my_module -sname my_node

The -s switch will start a node, -sname specifies the node name: my_node
This will take a few sec. but next time you call erl_call the node 
is already started and the communication is really fast. To stop the
node use the -q switch.

> Another question: Erlang seems to compile to P-code, right? 

No, JAM code. See the link to Ericsson CSLab and look under
publications to get more info about JAM and BEAM.

> Are there any native compilers?

beam: used to (?) compile to C 
gerl: a prototype which implements a subset of Erlang can be
      found from the Links page. 

Also at the links page, there is a link to Uni.of.Montreal.
Not sure if they compile to native code though.

> Or something like python freeze, that allows to pack up
> the whole system in one (admittingly huge) binary and sent 
> it someone?

No.

/Tobbe



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