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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

How problematic is the BEAM startup time for this? I made a command line tool once and it took a while to start the VM but this was on a much older machine...

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It's going to completely depend on the tool. I can start an elixir app in half a second, which is going to be unacceptable in many situations.

That said, there are also many situations where that is a tradeoff absolutely worth making!

I wonder if you can tree-shake unnecessary modules in the release. There's a lot of stuff in the otp beam release you probably don't need in any given CLI app and it should be easy to parse bytecode and figure out dependencies.

That's one of the goals of Firefly[1]

> It can compile code more efficiently than the BEAM by stripping out dead code and compiling only what’s necessary for an application.

Though, they only mention faster compilation and smaller digital footprint, not faster startup.

[1] https://dockyard.com/blog/2022/09/01/dockyard-r-d-firefly-op...

Shouldn’t be necessary if you configure your release to start in interactive move instead of embedded mode as modules would then get loaded lazily

Hello friend, I'm chasing you down from a previous comment, did you get anywhere with that elixir/liveview text ui ?

I did not. Too busy at work.

I am still very keen on this, even if its not a 'web app' style tui code. There has also been interest on genserver.social too.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I think there may be someone else in the community working on this

found it, even has the same name: https://github.com/E-xyza/ex_term

Its amusing that you both came to the same conclusion on naming :)

If you have several commands you're likely to use and possibly pipe together, it might make sense to have lightweight compiled C/Rust command client stubs invoke an Elixir server, so you'd pay the BEAM startup cost only once, in exchange for some complexity.

~200-250ms on my machine

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