The primary reason to use Erlang Abstract Format instead of Core Erlang is tooling. Using that we get, basically for free dialyzer, cover, debugger and erl_eval. Compiling to Core is also a bit awkward since it’s a moving target - it’s treated as an internal detail of the Erlang compiler and changing rather frequently between releases.

There is an ElixirSips video showing how to use HiPE https://www.dailydrip.com/topics/elixirsips/drips/native-compilation-with-hipe

For the record, you can set the env-var ERLC_COMPILER_OPTIONS with options to be passed to erlc when compiling Erlang and Elixir code (because Elixir code gets translated to Erlang).

See https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/2665

e…g. to compile only your deps native:

ERL_COMPILER_OPTIONS="native" mix deps.compile

You know it’s working if compiling takes much longer!

You use hipe exactly the same way you do it in erlang - with a module attribute. The syntax in elixir is @compile .... The hipe bit in the VM manifest is merely stating that this VM has support for hipe-compiled programs.

Hipe doesn’t work too good if you have a code that switches often between hipe and non-hipe code - the switches are expensive.

I never used HiPE per module attribute in erlang, but using {erl_opts, [{native, o3}]} in my rebar.config.

So could you please provide a full example of how to activate HiPE for a single module, and for the complete project as well?