Elixir Static App Binaries

Folks, stop expecting that @joeerl and I will come up with the solutions to everything. If it is a problem in the community, the community should get together and solve it.

While we can’t provide the same as Go/Rust, since we don’t compile to native code, we can probably get pretty close, even if it is a self-extractable release.

Also, last time I checked Nerves is able to cross compile the whole OS, NIFs and applications into 20MB. Go look there.

Java also has the same limitations as us and a quick search shows that solutions are available.

This seems like an appropriate time to post this, from a recent comment on HN:

We [at Discord] have one (very low throughput) service that runs Elixir inside of a docker container, however, the rest just run BEAM on the VM directly, with no containerization. BEAM at higher load does not enjoy sharing cores with anyone. Most of our Elixir services sit at 80-100% of CPU on all cores. BEAM likes to spin for work, and is CPU topology aware. Two BEAM scheduler threads running on the same core is a recipe for disaster. Since we’re fully utilizing our VMs, and shipping the tars is simple enough, Docker gave us too much operational overhead for it to be worth it.

18:15:08 cees@cees-MBP-Linux:~/tmp/foo$ mix escript.build
Generated escript foo with MIX_ENV=dev
18:15:12 cees@cees-MBP-Linux:~/tmp/foo$ time ./foo
hello, world

real	0m0.179s
user	0m0.166s
sys	0m0.056s