When comparing HaLVM vs LING, the Slant community recommends HaLVM for most people. In the question“What are the best unikernels?” HaLVM is ranked 7th while LING is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose HaLVM is:
What HaLVM 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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly secure
What HaLVM 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 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.
Cons
Con Compiling from source can be problematic
Usually with cutting-edge software the compilation process never really goes as expected. Same is with HaLVM as well.
You may need to install additional libraries that are probably missing or even tweak configurations here and there. So it would be best to avoid this process if you don't feel comfortable enough with compiling from source. So you have to stick with the package manager of choice (if it's available for the particular Linux distro you are using).