ElixirConf 2019 - Day 1 Morning Keynote - Brian Cardarella, Luke Imhoff, Paul Schoenfelder

This is a project formerly known as Lumen, which myself and the other core devs presented on at ElixirConf a few years ago: ▶ this video A lot has changed since then. The name change came about because we found too many projects named "Lumen" also were launched around the same time or shortly thereafter. Originally I envisioned a path towards creating a new WASM framework to build web applications using Elixir. Since then LiveView has come out and has made this less of a concern for us. While WASM compilation will be possible and we hope to backfill the runtime needs for web development the real focus and interest in this project for me is... WASI compilation. With Firefly we will be able build self-contained binaries that will have all (many) of the benefits building applications with the BEAM and distributed systems. If WASI can run on something you should be able to compile your Elixir applications with Firefly and target your desired chipset. We recently reached a milestone that we are hoping to release a blog post about it in the near future.

If you are looking for more substantial technical information, they are found in the ElixirConf ‘19 keynote speech and demo when Lumen was announced. ▶ this video

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] ▶ this video

Cool idea, cool technology, cool project. I really just don't get the "why", even after watching the ElixirConf presentation [1] about it. Like what is the use-case for this, specifically? [1] ▶ this video