[erlang-questions] Erlang "jar" file?

[Kenneth Lundin]

Hi,

Loading code from zip archives or whatever other archive format has
already been implemented but not released.

We tried code loading from zip files with focus on compatibility and
improved speed for
code loading (it is easier if you skip the compatibility or make the
user to choose between ordinary code loading as of today and archive
loading)
There was no speed improvement so we did not release it.
But now we are considering adding support for code loading from
archive files again,
not for the sake of improved speed but for the reduced number of files you need
to distribute.

This will most probably show up in a R12B-x release next year.

/Kenneth (Erlang/OTP team at Ericsson)

On 10/31/07, Geoff Cant <nem@REDACTED> wrote:
> Bernhard Damberger <bernied@REDACTED> writes:
>
> > Does erlang support the idea of an archived collection of compiled code, like
> > a jar file? I know that Joe Armstrong wrote a tool called ear that creates
> > an archive for stand alone erlang (see http://www.sics.se/~joe/sae.html).
> > But I got the impression that this is not supported by the standard erlang
> > distribution (or is no longer being actively developed).
> >
> > All the interpreter really needs to do is to be able to load the .beam files
> > in from an archived file (say zip format). So, can it currently do so?
> >
> > _bernhard
>
> I tried building a zip loader as an exercise and it turned out not to be
> too difficult. (http://git.erlang.geek.nz/?p=ssae.git;a=summary)
>
> It probably needs to be taken further so that you can do something like
> 'erl -s ssae init -s yourmodule init' and only distribute ssae.beam.
>
> It would be good if the people who are interested in SAE to put together
> a wiki page detailing what they expect out of SAE - then we could see
> how difficult it would be to provide that. My guess is that modifying
> the runtime system to load beam files out of a zip section in the
> runtime binary would be tricky - but maybe that's not the requirement.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Geoff Cant
>
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