Erlang "init terminating in do_boot" error when calling Elixir from .NET

Did you install elixir from something that requires some environment from your shell, like asdf for instance?

The issue appears on Windows, where I installed Erlang and Elixir via the official Windows installers, and asdf is not supported on Windows. I use asdf on Ubuntu, but this works fine there.

This has to somehow be related to how on Windows, Elixir is wrapped via scripts, and one isn’t calling binaries directly. But it’s strange how it works fine on the command line. I’m not sure there’s much else I would need to or can do on the .NET side.

I believe you’re right about this. You could call erl.exe with the args that the batch script passes to it.

I presume you don’t want to flip things and have elixir call F# via a port, because that’s not too hard. There is an ETF library in F#.

I presume you don’t want to flip things and have elixir call F# via a port, because that’s not too hard. There is an ETF library in F#.

Haha. The context of my question is actually to help test and verify an encoding/decoding library I wrote myself in F# for the Erlang External Term Format. My main goal is playing around with some ideas around an Elixir Port and F# interaction, and so I wrote my own ETF library in F# since it’s not too hard and gives me control when integrating it into the port abstraction. This question is to help test the F# encoding/decoding across the various OS platforms using both regular tests and property-based tests. The example function I gave is similar to the real one, which is used in tests to write out a string to Elixir, have Elixir convert it to an Erlang term, then F# decodes it and tests it against what’s expected. Something like this:

[<Fact>]
let ``Decode tuple from stream`` () =
    @"{:ok, :another}" |> writeAndDecode |> should equal (ErlangTerm.Tuple [ErlangTerm.Atom "ok"; ErlangTerm.Atom "another"])

Calling elixir.bat --version as an argument to the powershell command works, but it isn’t entirely clear to me why that works but calling the script directly doesn’t work. Mainly trying to know why to further my understanding of how both Elixir and F# interact with the command line. It also seems like an issue with the Erlang crash dump when simply calling elixir.bat --version.

Very well. You do have to think about passing env vars on to child/sub processes, something I discovered when playing with porting elixir.bat to a Zig executable.

ETF library has caused me no issues other than the poor choice of namespaces.

You do have to think about passing env vars on to child/sub processes

It’s possible that that’s what PowerShell is doing properly when I use powershell elixir.bat --version. I have no idea though.

ETF library has caused me no issues other than the poor choice of namespaces.

Which ETF F# library are you using? Last time I checked there were a couple, including one for the BERT term format. My library just does a subset of the base ETF format, since some of them don’t make sense in the context I am thinking of. The encoding/decoding is rather easy, so I’ll probably keep my own, but it would be nice to see other implementations, especially if they’ve been kept up to date.

https://github.com/erpuno/etf

After setting things up, I loop over this:

// reply ok on startup
    sendOk (encode "0")
    try
        while true do
            inputBufferSize <- stdin.Read(inputBuffer, 0, 4)
            // input buffer should be size 4, which tells us the size of the message
            match inputBufferSize with
            | 4 -> ()
            | 0 ->
                logger.Debug "Port shutdown, exiting"
                cleanup logger connection
                Environment.Exit(int ReturnCode.Ok)
            | size ->
                logger.Error $"Expected 4 bytes, got {size} containing '{Encoding.UTF8.GetString(inputBuffer)}'"
                cleanup logger connection
                Environment.Exit(int ReturnCode.BadMessageSize)
                
            let msgSizeBytes =
                if BitConverter.IsLittleEndian
                then inputBuffer |> Array.take 4 |> Array.rev
                else inputBuffer |> Array.take 4
            let msgSize = BitConverter.ToInt32(msgSizeBytes, 0)
            
            // read the ETF
            inputBufferSize <- stdin.Read(inputBuffer, 0, msgSize)
            
            // decode the ETF
            let term = ETF.Decoder.decodeTerm inputBuffer
            
            match term with
            | Term.Tuple [Term.Binary requestId; msg] ->
                match decodeMessage msg with
                | SomeMessage(arg1, arg2) -> 
                ...