Bake Once, Start Fast: Instant-Launch Erlang Executables

Single-file executables are great, but cold start is still dominated by ERTS loading and transforming many .beam modules, and sometimes running the JIT. Fine for servers, painful for command line tools that start often. This talk presents a packaging approach that bakes modules into their runnable in-memory form so startup can skip most loader work. We compare two paths: statically linked, relocation-patched module images, and a minimal allocator that undumps only what the Erlang runtime needs. Atom handling is part of it, but so are relocations, literals, exports, and validation. Targeting Erlang means every language in the ecosystem benefits, and leaves a path to embedded use later.