erl -noshell +sbwt none -smp disable +A 0 -mode minimal -eval 'io:format("Hello world~n").' -s init stop

instead, which is much closer to what python/java et al runs, then at least I get around 2850 syscalls.

The constant ppoll:ing is because erts spins looking for new work from any fd. Specifically "/sys/devices/system/node/node0" is in order to check for cpu topology updates by the operating system, i.e. if for some reason a core/cpu is taken offline of something like that. This is limited in my example above by "+sbwt none"

IIRC the bind is an UDP socket to talk to the local nameserver. This is removed in my example with "-mode minimal".

Erlang is like another system inside your system, it's more akin to booting a system inside a vm just to echo some hello world.

Erlang isn't a bare programming language like C, or even a high level, but still fundamentally simple language like Python.

It isn't just an intermediary bytecode running in a VM, like Java, that maps bytecode instructions to OS instructions.

It is instead more like a Smalltalk environment or similar; an entire ecosystem running for the specific purpose of providing you a very particular kind of programming environment.

† ring-0 only, no memory protection, exploratory dev/art focused

To put it another way, if you run code on a system with concurrency units sharing the memory (the heap), your code is running on DOS or Windows 3.1 which was cool in 1990s.

Erlang/Elixir is like running your code on a modern OS with a process memory separation, preemptable concurrency (processes don't have to yield by hand to others). Built in tracing and monitoring facilities (tracing, observer, dbg). Built in networking (distribution, global process registration, in memory distributed db) etc.

I believe Erlang would do some interesting things there

Compared with strace on Linux it is like night and day.

On debugging, second bullet. She seems to agree.

One serious problem - it has to run as root.

If you want to debug Erlang program then Erlang/OTP already includes tools to help you do that: http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/ - 92 page manual that includes: - tracing functions called with defined parameters - analyzing crash dumps, memory leaks, cpu scheduling

epmd is a separate process, yes. But an erlang node connects to epmd in order to register it's name on it. It will bind a socket to talk with epmd (probably among other things).. See also: http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_dist_protocol.html

  $ cat hello.tl
  (pprinl "hello, world")
  $ strace txr hello.tl 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
  77

  $ cat hello.c
  #include <stdio.h>
  int main(void) { printf("Hello, world\n"); }
  $ cc -O hello.c -o hello
  $ strace ./hello 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
  29

  $ strace gawk 'BEGIN { print "hello") }' 2>&1 > /dev/null  | wc -l
  84

  $ cat HelloWorld.java
  public class HelloWorld
  {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        System.out.println("Hello, world");
    }
  }
  $ strace java HelloWorld 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
  122

    $ strace python -c "print('hello world')" 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
    924

    $ strace python3 -c "print('hello world')" 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
    543

Using your example:

    $ strace python3 -c 'print("hello world", end="")' 2>&1 | hist
     1. stat                 122
     2. rt_sigaction         68
     3. fstat                67
     4. read                 55
     5. close                47
     6. open                 37
     7. mmap                 34
     8. lseek                30
     9. getdents             18
    10. mprotect             16
        ...                 
        TOTAL:               567

    $ strace python3 -S -c 'print("hello world", end="")' 2>&1 | hist
     1. rt_sigaction         68
     2. stat                 51
     3. fstat                39
     4. mmap                 31
     5. read                 27
     6. close                26
     7. open                 23
     8. mprotect             16
     9. lseek                15
    10. brk                  10
        ...                 
        TOTAL:               350

  % strace perl -e "print 'Hello, World';" 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
  192

    $ strace node -e 'console.log("hello world")' 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
      304

67

  $ strace txr -e '(put-line "hello")' 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
  70

Obviously there are those who care about reasonable startup times and, ... others. :)

By the way, TXR supports setuid operation, and so it makes a few extra syscalls to check its security situation (am I running setuid? setgid?)

Isn't it the case that in Java and Erlang we have a large VM environment that also needs to be launched before the first line of the trivial print statement is executed?

    $ cargo new --bin hello
    $ cd hello
    $ cargo build --release
    $ strace ./target/release/hello 2>&1 | wc -l           
    124

Why not do a specific call before the actual code to segment the strace, or run it with repetitions and subtract+divide to get calls/repetition?