[erlang-questions] Light-weight operating systems supporting Erlang in production web servers

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 16/09/17 9:29 PM, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> Old timer here :-)
>
> Just out of interest how large is Apline? (in MB?)

For what it's worth, TinyCore-8.0.iso is just under 17 MB.
Installed in VirtualBox and running, complete with GUI,
it's 21.7MB.  That doesn't include development tools.
I note that just the
"OTP 20.0 HTML Documentation File (33,948,386)"
is bigger than this and
"OTP 20.0 Windows 32-bit Binary File (96,337,114)"
is a lot bigger.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/intro.html
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html
The current Core (TinyCore minus GUI &c) is 11 MB.

Bringing in clang and its dependencies blows the system
out from 21.7 to 145.8 MB (+ 124.1 MB).
Adding gettext brought it to 148.0 MB (+ 2.2 MB).
Adding the manual pages and related tools brought
it up to 152.4 MB (+ 4.4 MB).  Add a couple of text
editors (NOT including emacs, which I actually like)
and it's 161.4 MB (+ 9.0 MB).

So the actual TinyCore distribution is about 1/8th of
a fairly minimal development environment.  I used to
run a full SunOS 3 environment on a 100 MB disc, and
40 MB of that was left over for my files.  How times change.

I suspect that TinyCore plus enough to *run* Erlang could
be quite small by today's standards.  Certainly you could
carry around TinyCore Linux + C development environment +
full Erlang distribution and run it comfortably from an
elderly memory stick.