The (unloved?) cli story

[corka149]

@John-Goff

The issue with cli tools in elixir is the startup time of the BEAM is not trivial in the context of a cli tool. It takes about half a second to launch the BEAM, which means that certain classes of cli tools which require quick feedback are not going to feel very responsive.

I think for the majority of cli tools this is fine. A half second is low enough to feel snappy. But I also think this is the biggest bump. I developed a small cli for measuring my work time and it took 3 seconds for starting. :-/

@John-Goff

They do bundle the Erlang runtime, but they call out to system libraries which must be the same as the ones for the OS you compiled on.

I am aware of this and think this is manageable. At work I developed a cli tool in Python for other (Java) developers and no one wants to install Python. So I made use of something that bundles the cli with the runtime like Mix.release does.

@John-Goff

I would love it if we could get the startup time of the BEAM down to the point where it wouldn’t make a difference for a cli app, but just due to the nature of the systems Erlang and elixir get chosen for I doubt that anyone will be willing to work on that any time soon.

I am with you. Maybe it is possible to turn off some features for more speed.

@derek-zhou

Depends on what you call CLI

Something that uses the command line interface . In your case it is the script around socat.