Elixir Static App Binaries

Until you loop while calling it.

Good catch. ODL’s example has to load the compiler. Naked ERTS isn’t so bad.

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

That is perfectly fine, having in mind that Erlang / Elixir are aiming at long-running services and servers and not one-off scripts. In that area Go and Rust are hard to beat and that is okay. You don’t need to use Elixir for absolutely everything. It already does quite a lot.

I wonder what the state of Erlang’s LLVM support is. That’s how the Scala folks are attempting to bring Scala to the CLI world.

No, thats not a CLI application, thats a terminal based application or sometimes seen as TUI application (Text/Terminal User Interface).

CLI means Command Line Interface, so it describes a tool, which you can fully operate through the command line, usually without asking for user feedback, or at least making it optional (eg. apts --yes switch or pacmans --noconfirm).

Personally I would call Beats a “CLI app”. It is a ncurses based drum machine and I think that Elixir is well suited to it and I think it would be great if it was possible to easily build it into a binary for running from the command line.

This is what it looks like:

211758×576 39.8 KB

Github: GitHub - mtrudel/beats: Beats is a drum machine · GitHub
Conference talk: https://youtu.be/XN4WuOujr38?t=1102 (video set to load to beats-specific section)

To give a practical example: The command-line client for CloudFoundry for orchestrating your CF deployments is written in Go and can be downloaded as a single binary.
I also created a command-line tool for my software distribution platform DBLSQD. I might have written it in Elixir if there had been a more convenient way of packaging it but there wasn’t, so I went with Node instead.

For me I mean things that are quick runs that I manually run from a command line generally stringed with other commands. If it’s something that is long-time running then it should be a service and I start it as such.

Maybe you should describe what you mean by CLI work. You can start all programs from the command line after all.