This is just me daydreaming, kindly please let me know if I this is completely delusional…

Maybe a naive question, but I’ll try my luck: would it be technically feasible to implement distribution of compiled .beam files for Elixir packages, apart from distributing the source code (e.g. what we have now)? Or there’s a good reason, including a technical one, it’s rather not to be done / explored?

The key goal of this would be to reduce app compilation times, especially for big applications.

For example, right now, a particular app at my employer is taking a good 5 minutes to compile from scratch on a not particularly beefy VM on GitHub Actions (there are various strategies to improve the compilation speed there, though that’s not the point of this message).

I am wondering if it’d be feasible to bypass package compilation altogether, by downloading package’s compiled .beam files. This way all .beam files for all packages are downloaded and are ready to be bundled with the application during application compilation step.

Obviously, some packages rely on compile-time configuration options, so it may be next to impossible to compile a package in a one-size-fits-all manner. But maybe there’s a way to ship compiled .beam files for packages that most people could benefit from?

One reason against compiling I can think of is, for example, the potential difficulty of verifying that the compiled package indeed matches the source code, e.g. there’s no malicious code baked in the .beam. OS-level package managers seem to have figured that out somehow though?

Btw, if this was (or is being) discussed / explored before or elsewhere, I’d be super grateful if you could throw a link at me!