When comparing LING vs Mirage OS, the Slant community recommends Mirage OS for most people. In the question“What are the best unikernels?” Mirage OS is ranked 2nd while LING is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Mirage OS is:
There are more than 100 libraries compatible with MirageOS available and more are being developed everyday.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly integrated with Erlang
LING is highly compatible with Erlang and is able to easily understand .beam
files. Developers can write programs in Erlang and easily deploy it to LING unikernels.
Pro Few external libraries
LING is very lightweight. For example, it only uses three external libraries.
Pro Large collection of libraries available
There are more than 100 libraries compatible with MirageOS available and more are being developed everyday.
Pro Built with security in mind
What MirageOS does in simple terms is to provide only the minimal needed for an app to run. It provides only the required network and hardware drivers needed to execute.
Using this approach it minimizes the attack surface for potential hackers since they don't have any shell to log into or any other insecure cruft that other deployment methods, such as full operating systems have.
Pro OCaml
Cons
Con May be too much for regular development work
Letting developers work closer to the metal also makes them lose a lot of the useful abstractions a normal OS has which are not built for no reason. Considering this, it may not be a good idea to always use MirageOS for deploying an application.