Embedded Erlang

[Per Hedeland]

Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
>
>>| My intention is actually to try to cross-compile Erlang for an embedded 
>>system
>
>Sure, but my project is something more like 32KB and a dedicated OS...

Um, I don't want to sound negative, but *32KB*? What minor part of the
language do you plan to actually leave *in*?:-) Seriously, the "size"
command on FreeBSD (i.e. x86 arch) says

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 279497   44564  113454  437515   6ad0b .../erts-47.4.1/bin/jam

- i.e. just the runtime system is almost 10 times that in pure native
machine *code* (which doesn't include anything from the C library), and
then you need a bit of data (data+bss above), and it would be nice to be
able to actually fit some Erlang code in there too...:-)

I'm sure it would be possible to reduce that if you decided to leave out
some parts that you didn't need (this requires intimate understanding of
the runtime system C code of course), but even the basic emulator (just
instruction interpreter - no BIFs, processes, garbage collection...) is
almost 32K code.

I really do hope that you succeed in building a "really" "embedded"
Erlang, but I think you'll stand a better chance of doing that with more
realistic expectations...

--Per Hedeland
per@REDACTED