[throwawaymaths]

Yes. In elixir, you can install GPU stuff (Nx) with very few problems. Some people have built some really cool tools like burrito, which cross-compile and bundles up the VMs to other architectures. Even before that it's been pretty common to cross-compile from x86 to an arm raspberry pi image in the form of Nerves.

As a rule elixir devs don't do system level dependencies, probably because of lessons learned from the hell scape that is python (and Ruby)

Yesterday I onboarded a coworker onto the elixir project, he instinctively put it into a docker container. I laughed and just told him to run it bare (he runs macos, I run Linux). There were 0 problems out of the box except I forgot the npm incantations to load up the frontend libraries.

[korijn]

Ok, now I am curious :) let's try some typical problems from the Python package ecosystem:

- Can you resolve precompiled GPU dependencies with system managed CUDA driver versions?

- Are there packages that can convert PDF to PNG without system dependencies?

- Can you run a Qt GUI app on CI without needing to do any additional system setup?

With regards to cross compilation tools like burrito, that's neat! But Python is not a compiled language.

[throwawaymaths]

1) not sure how Nx does it.

2) not that I can find for that specific task but the typical strategy is to download (or compile) a binary, drop it into a {project-dependency}[0]-local "private assets" directory, and call out the binary. This is for example how I embed zig pl into elixir (see "zigler") without system-level dependencies. Setting this up is about 40 lines of code.

3) wx is preferred in the ecosystem over qt, but this (and openssl) are the two biggies in terms of "needs system deps", though it's possible to run without wx.

For native graphics, elixir is treading towards glfw, which doesn't have widgets, but from what I hear there are very few if any gotchas in terms of using it.

I bring up cross-compilation, because burrito allows you to cross-compile natively implemented code, e.g. bcrypt that's in a library. So libraries that need c-FFI typically don't ship binaries, they compile at build time. Burrito binds "the correct" architecture into the c-flags and enables you to cross compile c-FFI stuff, so you don't have a system level dependency.

[0] not that this has happened, but two dependencies in the same project could download different versions of the same binary and not collide with each other.

[korijn]

So it seems python and elixir are not that different at all. You are handling these problems the same way as the Python community is.