[juhatl]

I watched the ElixirConf 2019 keynote [1] as soon as it came up. While I was left excited about Lumen in general, I wasn't entirely sure what kinds of things Lumen would be most useful for.

Being able to ship a single binary (like with Go or Rust) sounds handy, but shipping a tarball hasn't been that much of a challenge either. Being able to run BEAM code in the browser also sounds handy, but due to size issues I probably wouldn't want to ship the entire BEAM to my users either, right?

Can someone with a more thorough understanding of Lumen share some thoughts on this?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U

[rehemiau]

I think they mentioned this in the keynote, but bytecode size is on their radar. To allow dead code elimination, they are not planning to support hot upgrades. This means that you wouldn't be shipping the whole OTP - only the parts that you're using.

[johnisgood]

What would hot upgrades entail in the context of Web and for example Lumen? What would its benefits or drawbacks be? Would it be useful? Would it raise security concerns? Just want to play with the idea. :)

[sansnomme]

If Wasm does become as pervasive as JVM i.e. a universal VM of sorts, there will be plenty of IoT equipment using it since the trend now for anything "embedded" that doesn't demand ultra low power consumption is to use a full Linux system à la Raspberry Pi. A company optimizing for a tight memory/performance budget and whose purpose does not require high uptime across the entire fleet can simply use traditional blue-green deployments or something.

[693471]

You won't be shipping the entirety of BEAM. That's the point of this announcement and what makes this so exciting and plausible.