Shock horror

[Joe Armstrong]

On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, Denise Stack (EEI) wrote:

> Hi,
> this could almost be amusing, if it didn't reinforce the opinion that
> Erlang is getting more complex with each release....
> 

  Just for  fun I computed the  transitive closure of  the module call
graph starting from  init.erl - If you include  {stdlib, kernel, sasl}
then init.erl calls directly or indirectly 91 different modules.

  If you include *all* the applications this goes up to 113.

  I actually performed a similar analysis  a few years ago, in a paper
I wrote  dated April 24  1997 I found  that the transitive  closure of
init included 38 modules -  so yes the complexity *is* increasing with
time.

  This means that 
	
        a) Things may load slowly 
	b) It becomes increasingly difficult to ship stand-alone 
	   applications since nobody is really sure of what code is needed.
  
  A consequence of c) is the *ship everything* mentality.

  I'm going to take a good hard look at the system to see if we can't
identify a minimal kernel ...

	/Joe