This is pretty neat and I love how cleanly the application code reads. I’m curious: is the Erlang VM super fast? I would have expected VM startup time to dominate the overall time to start.
[0]: https://podman.io/
Erlang VM startup is ok, but it is not ultra fast, and it can be easily slowed down with many modules in releases or slow applications. Additionally as it was said - Erlang works best in case of long-running instances where the VM is handling spawning and managing of short lived internal processes.
First draft of this article also included the socket activation and FD passing section, but these were making the article way to long, so I moved them to the Part 2 where I will have more space for them. With socket activation Erlang VM startup time is negligible problem.