Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[James Hague]

I was going through the erlang-questions archive, and it struck me how
often a couple of issues have been brought up and just how much time
has gone by without any action on them:

1. Joe's structs or another more dynamic alternative to records.  This
would fix a huge hole in the language, IMO.  When I write code in Perl
or Python, I'm always pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to group
values together in a simple and dynamic fashion.  Erlang's records are
simplstic and static in comparison.

2. Some way of distributing standalone Erlang applications.  There was
SAE for a while, but it went stale and was never official.  There are
some directory tree trimmers, such as the one used for Wings 3D, but,
wow, that's an ugly route.  Maybe some clear documentation about
what's needed to make a mini-Erlang system would help here?

Part of me wants to say that Erlang is stagnating too much, that
there's such a fixation (and understandably!) on supporting legacy
applications that even conservative changes to the language or
libraries are shot down.

In frustration,
James