[erlang-questions] Stand Alone Erlang Still Updated?

[Jim McCoy]

I am not familiar with RubyScript2exe but more with its progenitor
py2exe, and there are a variety of options and ideas that could be
mined from the various scripting language "compilers."  One
interesting bit that py2exe enables is a variety of options regarding
how to handle the archive file itself; python imports are pulled out
of the zip archive, but DLLs can be provided as individual files that
are distributed with the collection of file or can be loaded directly
out of the zip file, and the entire zip file can also be appended to
the exe file so that you are truly distributing a single file.

>From an erlang perspective you would need to be able to import/load
the beam files out of the zip file, the rest of the magic is just
knowing the platform-specific calls to make to deal with library
loading. There is nothing that I can think of which would prevent you
from adding additional chunks of data to the file at a later point to
deal with updating and hot-swapping of code.

Getting this feature available to Erlang developers has some pretty
nice long-term benefits: until an Erlang app can be easily distributed
to end users it will not have many people working on tasks outside of
the standard "server room" applications, and until someone has an itch
to scratch there is a lot less effort going into things like improving
os-specific features and libraries...

Jim