Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

I agree.

Wings would never have got as large user-base as it now has
if users would first have to install Erlang/OTP. I know because
the number one request in the early days was to have a
standalone installer for Wings that included the necessary parts
of Erlang/OTP. Even people who had successfully got Wings running,
requested it because they wanted to show it for some friends and it
was too much trouble to download another 25 MB package (the size
of R8B for Windows).

I had an idea to write a generic tool that would help packaging an Erlang
application in the same way as Wings does, but I never seems to
find the time to finish it.

/Bjorn

Peter Lund <erlang@REDACTED> writes:

> Personally I am convinced it would help marketing erlang a lot and
> here is the reasoning:
> 
> When a friend (or customer) of a erlang enthusiast wonders what can be
> done in erlang, the enthusiast naturally wants to send the friend (a
> windows user) a demo of something that the friend can run directly on
> his computer.
> 
> Then the enthusiast says: "sorry, but to do this you need first to do
> A then B and C, then *hopefully* it works. Please tell me if you have
> any problem and I'll help you out running the demo".
> 
> How many minus points do you think Erlang as a language gets in the
> friend's mind when receiving such an email??
> 
> Yes it is true that Erlang do not get many plus points just because
> the demo is easy for the friend/customer/manager to install and run,
> because that is the *normal* / *expected* behaviour of any demo in any
> other language. But if Erlang is perceived too complicated and only
> something for nerds and geeks, Erlang looses lots of the strong
> credibility it should have for its potential to be the language for a
> company's next big project development.
> 
> That is why I think that any packaging tool that helps the erlang
> enthusiast creating a minimal erlang environment + demo app (for
> windows foremost) with options to include other stuff as well would be
> very useful for the marketing of Erlang. If this tool also handles a
> lot more it would just be a lot better of course.
> 
> /Peter
> 
> Robert Virding wrote:
> 
> > Kostis Sagonas skrev:
> >
> >> Bengt Kleberg wrote:
> >>  > On 2006-02-15 21:01, Claes Wikstrom wrote:
> >>  > ...deleted
> >>  > > 1. Strip down OTP and make a base package consisting
> >>  > >    or erts, compiler, stdlib and kernel.
> >>  >  > a good idea.
> >>
> >> So far, I have not read any extremely convincing arguments why
> >> doing this will make Erlang more popular or easy to adopt for
> >> serious project development. So I am not sure whether this is
> >> such a good idea as others think it is.
> >
> >
> > I forgot to add that I also wonder if it would make Erlang more
> > popular, but it would be easier to make stand-alone applications
> > that don't contain everything. It would also make it easier to build
> > new implementations as the dependencies become clearer. (and
> > hopefully the boot sequence)
> >
> > Robert
> >
> 

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB