[erlang-questions] Stand Alone Erlang or Equivalent

[Benjamin Tolputt]

Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
> Why would beam files more securely protected if packed in a zip 
> archive as compared to unpacked in a directory?
It is not so much "securing" the beam files from people as to stop them 
"replacing" the beam files easily. In an encrypted zip (or better yet, 
appended to a protected executable) the "core" beam files used at the 
"low level" of Erlang can be protected from "easy" replacement by casual 
users.

Everyone in game development realizes that it is impossible to 
completely protect a product from hacking, but it is a commercial 
necessity (coming from the publishers) that one include SOME form of 
copyright protection mechanism. By adding a "standard" EXE protection 
mechanism to the Erlang VM executable and including the "core" Erlang 
beam files (i.e. kernel, stdlib, etc) in the exe file - we get enough 
"protection coverage" to make the publishers happy.

For me, there is also the added bonus of simple "single file" deployment 
but I don't have to deal with third-parties in order to deploy (and so 
it is not a necessity for me).
> There is already a mechanism to encrypt the debug_info data that might 
> be included in the beam files. I suppose it would be relatively easy 
> to do the same with the actual beam code and decrypt at load time.
This is talking about something completely different. I am not 
particularly worried about the byte-code being readable. It is more 
about making it hard for them to be changed (which I realize is somewhat 
the opposite of an Erlang advantage we all like).

Regards,
B.J.Tolputt