Oh! How could I have missed this? It seems to do exactly what my wrapper script does, except for extracting to ./tmp instead of tmpfs. Amazing!
It’s also compressed, to it creates a file that is basically the same size as the one I posted.
wmnnd
1
wmnnd
If you want to try it, I’ve uploaded the Distillery-created “transient” executable of the same application here:
=> clock.run
1
wmnnd
After some more experimenting, here is a 64 bit binary that should truly run on any Linux system regardless of its libc version or other system dependencies. I’ve successfully tried it on Alpine and Ubuntu.
=> clock.linux_x86_64 (18.2 MB)
Right now, this is using the OTP build from @bitwalker’s alpine image but maybe it would be possible to do a custom build of OTP for even smaller file sizes.
Let me know if you have had a chance to try it and if it worked!
Do you think this path should be explored further?
4
MartinElvar
This is definitely a killer feature of go! i would personally love to see more of this, so darn cool. Good job.
Consider the ease of deployment, I know it won’t feature rollbacks etc. but you don’t always need the entire bonus package.
1
dmarko484
Tried on Ubuntu in Windows 10 (there is Linux support in W10).
a) clock.run - works fine, I can even run it with console etc.
b) clock.linux_x86_64 - fails to start
$ ./clock.linux_x86_64
Unpacking application to /home/dmarko/.clock-432-20681.tmp …
Starting application …
/home/dmarko/.clock-432-20681.tmp/clock/erts-10.0.3/bin/erlexec: 1: /home/dmarko/.clock-432-20681.tmp/clock/erts-10.0.3/bin/erlexec: Syntax error: “(” unexpected
Removing unpacked application files …
Application finished with status code 0
0
wmnnd
Thanks for trying this!
Curious that the second app doesn’t seem to work. Could you try downloading just the contents, then cd to the clock directory and run bin/clock?
If that doesn’t work, try erts-10.0.3/bin/erlexec.
I’d be interested to see what’s going on there …
0
dmarko484
The same error …
$ ./bin/clock
/home/dmarko/c/clock/erts-10.0.3/bin/erlexec: 1: /home/dmarko/c/clock/erts-10.0.3/bin/erlexec: Syntax error: “(” unexpected
0
dmarko484
bitwalker
Leader
The primary reason why this is not happening is probably just because nobody did it yet.
There was at one point a version of the compiler (that Joe A. wrote IIRC), which would compile an Erlang application to a static binary. It was removed from the Erlang compiler quite some time ago (around R10 I think) because it was becoming unmaintainable. I suspect it is a non-trivial effort to reintroduce it (I did some experimenting to try and bring it back, but it was more than I could tackle with the time available to me).
Short of someone whipping up a heavily modified compiler and runtime, and getting official support for it, I don’t think we’re anywhere near golang-like static binaries. As much as I’d love that capability, I’m personally of the feeling that focusing our attention in that direction is attempting to solve the wrong problem. I certainly won’t discourage anyone from giving it a shot, but I think we have lower hanging fruit.
6
wmnnd
I think the “package and unpack” approach we both happened to have come up with seems to be a good compromise.
I have patched the binaries in clock.linux_x86_64 so they can be run with musl linker, libc and shared libraries that I’ve also included in the package. This process could also be automated and would give us a practical way to use Elixir in places that are currently the domain of Go.
Of course, it would be preferable to get a static build of ERTS but that doesn’t seem to be possible from what I gathered looking at the configure options, right? The bundle would still need to be temporarily unpacked somewhere but at least the linker patching step wouldn’t be necessary.
0