Is Erlang small enough for embedded systems?
Rule of thumb: if the embedded system can run an operating system like linux, then it is probably possible to get current implementations of Erlang running on it with a reasonable amount of effort. Getting Erlang to run on, say, an 8 bit CPU with 32kByte of RAM is not feasible. People successfully run the Ericsson implementation of Erlang on systems with as little as 16MByte of RAM. It is reasonably straightforward to fit Erlang itself into 2MByte of persistant storage (e.g. flash or hard disk). A 2MByte stripped Erlang system can include the beam emulator and almost all of the stdlib, sasl, kernel, inets and runtime_tools libraries, provided the libraries are compiled without debugging information and are compressed: compile:file(“foo”, [compressed,no_debug_info]). This can be automated by editing otp.mk.in and adding +compressed +no_debug_info to the erlang compiler options and then rebuilding all the libraries.
