[erlang-questions] Erlang development workflow

[Garrett Smith]

Hi Frank,

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Frank Hunleth
<fhunleth@REDACTED> wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone could share ideas or experiences on their
> Erlang workflow especially for when the development machine is not the
> best test machine. My situation is that I am running Erlang on an
> embedded ARM that has Ethernet and decent DRAM and local storage. I
> can do some development on my PC, but there's special hardware
> attached to the ARM that my code needs to control sometimes. It would
> really be nice if I could have an efficient workflow that lets me
> develop on the PC and run on the ARM with the minimum number of manual
> steps between editing and testing. I'm coming to Erlang from an
> embedded C/C++ background. At the moment, my process is not much
> better than what I'm used to. It seems like there are many potential
> options, and I'm not sure what the best route is.

What are you used to in C/C++ land?

Apart from automating the code deployment to the target, I'm not sure
there's a lot more you can do. Erlang gives you great remote debugging
and code reloading, but that doesn't seem to be your problem.

If you wanted to keep the target Erlang VM running throughout your
development, you could run Mochiweb's "reloader" module to watch for
local changes to beam files and forcefully reload them. You'd still
need to push the compiled files over -- but that could be a part of
your make file (e.g. extend the compile target to compile and
ftp/rsync/etc to your target device).

Garrett