Erlang on Neo1973 cellphone
September 16th, 2007 tonyg
This evening, after fighting bitbake (in the form of the capricious “insane.bbclass” class definition) for a good few hours, I managed to get Erlang version R11B-5 running on my new cellphone.
Running the interactive erlang shell on a cellphone is pretty cool. Erlang’s built-in clustering support works fine: I’ve successfully connected an erlang node on my pc to a node on the phone using the USB ethernet support the phone provides.
The base package compiles down to a bit less than 7MB, which is a bit large. The full suite of libraries are another 22MB or so. It’s certainly possible to fine-tune the packaging process to get a smaller distribution, but for now I’m happy developing against what I have.
Update: I’ve posted my changed build scripts to OpenEmbedded’s bug tracker at bug 3014. Here’s a direct link to the tarball, if anyone would like to try it themselves.
Entry Filed under: Technology, Erlang
4 Comments Add your own
1. Bruce | September 16th, 2007 at 5:44 am
Nice one. You really should get your Erlang tagged stuff onto planeterlang.
I’m dying to get one of these phones, but I really want the built-in wifi one. NZ data costs are getting better but nothing like your neck of the woods.
What was the baseline memory usage for the shell?
2. tonyg | September 16th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
beam shows 4964kB resident after starting erl at the command-line. The virtual image size is 9080kB, and the shared size is 1580kB.
3. tonyg | September 16th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
By comparison, the “Today” application has 10MB resident, 21ish MB virtual, and the dialer app has 8.5MB resident, 32ish MB total!
4. tonyg | September 16th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Uh, of course, they have about 8MB of shared core each. Still.
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