Hi @kingdomcoder!

I am trying to understand what are the benefits you are going after. I understand there are benefits of not having to rely on Docker and toolchains like Zig can bring us closer to cross-compilation but at the same time you seem to be asking for features that are not generally useful:

1. I can’t think of why server companies would need to cross-compile to multiple platforms and, if I am deploying to prod, I would rather build and test on machines as close as possible to production

2. I still think chasing hot-code upgrades is of little benefit to 99.9% of the companies and definitely should not be part of the “standard” deployment process (at least it should be opt-in)

There are benefits to cross-compilation, mostly for distributable Elixir apps such as CLI and for desktop, and projects like Burrito and Elixir Desktop are trying to provide answers here.

The point here is: deployment is a wide area and I think we should be specific which problems we are trying to solve and for which domain, especially because the solutions will change (and to avoid scope creep!)

However, I think we will benefit greatly from a robust, vendor-agnostic deployment story with mix releases and I wonder what’s happening with this.

Unfortunately, as much as I resisted to the idea, the answer to this is Docker, because outside of it there is no unified pipeline. We could tell people: hey, this is a script to build a release and this is a script to download and run it, but it doesn’t change the fact that getting those scripts to run on each different CI and each different provider is going to be different… unless you use Docker.

My understanding is that those deploying Go/Rust apps to servers are on a similar boat: Docker is coordinating the building and the running.

The images built by hex include OTP, elixir and OS version on their tags.

There was a discussion in the build and packaging wg a while ago.

Also an interesting blog post with a proof of concept (with docker/containers):