I have a system that has thousands of run-time generated modules, some of which I want to cache for future reloading.

Ordinarily, the BEAM bytecode for a runtime generated module can be captured like so (How to read the BEAM bytecode compiled into memory and that is not on the disk?):

{:module, ^module_name, binary_contents, _} =
                    module_definition =
                    defmodule module_name do
                      unquote(contents)
                    end

And then saving bytecode to disk. The module can then later be loaded into memory with :code.load_binary or similar (code — OTP 29.0.2 (kernel 11.0.2))

However, the issue with using defmodule and then capturing the output is that because of Erlang’s hot reloading rules, loading versions of a module can cause processes to be killed. (code — OTP 29.0.2 (kernel 11.0.2))

So what I want to be able to do is create a BEAM file for a module without loading into memory.

I see the beginnings of an answer here: Getting each stage of Elixir's compilation all the way to the BEAM bytecode but I’m not sure how to implement what I need using this information.

I am not sure how to create an arbitrary function that will allow me to compile Elixir source code (as string or AST) directly into BEAM without affecting running processes at all.

Does anyone know how to do this? I have been scouring the elixir source code (elixir/lib/elixir/src/elixir_module.erl at 11a493ec4a07479a74e605b409dd16e23bb5cafe · elixir-lang/elixir · GitHub) to try understand how this may be done but I am struggling to get the answer I need.

P.S. Yes I know that when the BEAM file is loaded manually, it will still potentially cause processes to die, but I don’t think that this is avoidable.