Let there be light: from nothing to a running application
summary
Traces the boot path from shell script to C main to Erlang Application.start/2, showing three distinct C/Erlang argument-parsing rounds (eventually counting up to seven), the pre-loaded modules mechanism that embeds compiled .beam data, system helpers like the literal-area collector implemented in Erlang, and the VM’s direct-threaded bytecode interpreter that was refactored to gain about a 10% speedup. Measures startup as roughly 200 ms and points to an undocumented profile_boot flag for boot profiling.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:45LegsAK
- 7:06Preloaded modules
- 8:45System processes
- 10:40Process main
- 12:40First process
- 15:52Boot script
- 17:05Kernel and Esther
- 18:01Boot scripts
- 18:51Start function
- 21:03Elixir
- 23:19Mix
- 24:15Bonus
- 27:18Summary
- 28:22Questions
- 29:29User
