[erlang-questions] erlang-questions Digest, Vol 24, Issue 25

[Hakan Mattsson]

On Tue, 5 May 2009, John Haugeland wrote:

> > Work is ongoing in the direction towards a maintainable Standalone Erlang.
> 
> (the previous solution from Joe had its good sides but was not easy to
> > maintain)
> >
> 
> You just became my hero, Mr. Lundin <3  Standalone applications would be
> epic win, _especially_ if they were single executable files.

We do not attempt to have the runtime system as one single file. But
we want to be able to have substantially fewer files than today. For
most applications it will be possible to package them into one file
per application and load the beam code from that archive. However
applications that have port programs, device drivers etc. on priv-dir
will still need to have these file outside the archive file.

There will be two flavors of standalone applications:

 - The traditional one with a runtime system that is separately
   installed and shared between several of your application(s).
   You can package your application(s) into a single escript file
   and run it without installation if you have setup your paths
   right. Escripts can nowdays contain an archive file with several
   complete Erlang applications. Given that you have installed a
   runtime system, you will be able to ship your applications as one
   single executable escript.

 - A standalone system that containing your application(s) as well as
   the runtime system.

In both cases, Reltool (which still is experiental) can assist you in
creating a customized target system that only contains the parts of
Erlang/OTP that your applications needs and strip away stuff that you
do not need. For example you may not want to ship source code,
documentation etc. and you may want to strip away debug info from the
beam code.

> This won't be limited to Unix this time around, right?

No it is not limited to Unix.

/Håkan
---
Håkan Mattsson (uabhams)
Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB