As far as I know, it is already possible to create self-contained releases. They contain the runtime as well as erlang itself and therefore do not need anything installed if they are pure BEAM.

If they use NIFs they need the libraries installed.

If they open other programs, the other programs need to be installed.

Since the erlang runtime alone is already huge, I do not think this would make any sense to drive any further.

Of course can can create Releases that include ERTS, but you can’t put them in a single executable binary, can you?

I disagree. A compressed Elixir release including ERTS can be around 10 MB; looking at some CLI tools written in Go, they are definitely smaller (compressed at ~6 MB), but not by orders of magnitude

Yes, I believe this to be doable. With some changes to erts itself, it’s probably doable to just compile into a single binary and embed the modules inside of it - it already embeds the code for the “core” modules like erlang or init, etc. The primary reason why this is not happening is probably just because nobody did it yet.

I remember an erlang fork/tool thing way way back in the day that packaged everything up in a tar file that the erlang executable could ‘run’, no doubt you could pack those together too (this was why using the priv_dir call was important instead of hardcoding the path!).

There is currently no tool that will package an entire Erlang app & ERTS runtime into a single executable. Within the past 6 months there was a pretty extensive discussion on the Erlang mailing list about doing this: totally doable, probably not quite as easy as some might expect, just hasn’t been enough demand for it.

ODL: the only thing I know of packed up all the erlang BEAM files and a bit of code to run them, but not ERTS–are you thinking of something different that also packed ERTS into it?

Here is the most primitive version of a static “binary” I could come up with: A shell script that extracts its contents to tmpfs. I present to you:
A fully self-contained Elixir app with just 11.8 MB: => clock.sh

It’s compiled on a recent Ubuntu, so if you’re running any recent Linux distribution, it should work.

You can run it like this:

chmod +x clock.sh
./clock.sh

… and you’ll get the normal Distillery prompt. If you want to start the application, do ./clock.sh foreground
Here is the wrapper script: elixir-simple-dist.sh · GitHub

I accept this challenge and will try to run it in a naked chroot later the day.

It packed ERTS as well, and it was a definite hack but it ‘worked’. Mind that this was back in like 2001 or so…

Not exactly what OP is asking about, but for any passerby who want to glance at something they could already use today, Distillery supports self-extracting archives including a variant that cleans up after itself. I don’t believe the latter reaches for a tmpfs like @wmnnd has above, though.

https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/Mix.Tasks.Release.html#module-examples

Build an executable release

mix release --executable

Build an executable release which will cleanup after itself after it runs

mix release --executable --transient

Its a pity, but I have to postpone.

I just realised that I’m totally low on diskspace and I have to figure what can get deleted before doing anything else…