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> For example, you'll never get Ruby or Java to work on the BEAM VM Uhm, several ways: 1. Bind the VM in as a C FFI artefact 2. Write your ruby or Java bytec

> For example, you'll never get Ruby or Java to work on the BEAM VM Uhm, several ways: 1. Bind the VM in as a C FFI artefact 2. Write your ruby or Java bytecode emulator to run on one Erlang process only. Since Java supports threads, each thread could live on a different process, any shared memory would live on an Ets table. "never" is a strong word. The reason why people don't do it is that it's not worth it. I believe riak embeds javascript in the erlang VM. You can imagine why that might be worth it.

weatherlight 4y ago
and then you have a a kernel panic and bring down the entire VM. That doesn't work and totally defeats the whole point of having a VM, 9 9s or reliability, etc. Having a bunch of FF/NIFs in C to get around the VM is really missing the point.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  Yeah nice job eluding point #2
  - weatherlight 4y ago
    Then what's the point of the beam then? you can have the beam, but you can't have concurrency? I *could* eat soup with a paper airplane, I'm really not understanding how any of this is viable solution to implementing something like ruby on the BEAM VM. What would the performance hit be for using ETS for all your state? You'd just be better off using MRI for Ruby.
    - throwawaymaths 4y ago
      You're the one that suggested it, but I'll bite: you might want to embed say ruby in BEAM if you wanted to take advantage of hashicorp terraform. Perhaps you want to support middleware or a query system in another language but have the bulk of your architecture be BEAM. You might want to deduplicate internal libraries shared between teams. You might want to use a 3rd party library written in one of these langs. You might want to transition between lang X and a beam lang and what you need is to leakily expose BEAM modules using shim code as an intermediate. You might just be crazy and want to do weird shit for fun.
    - quechimba 4y ago
      Why can't you have concurrency?

weatherlight 4y ago

and then you have a a kernel panic and bring down the entire VM. That doesn't work and totally defeats the whole point of having a VM, 9 9s or reliability, etc. Having a bunch of FF/NIFs in C to get around the VM is really missing the point.

throwawaymaths 4y ago
Yeah nice job eluding point #2
- weatherlight 4y ago
  Then what's the point of the beam then? you can have the beam, but you can't have concurrency? I *could* eat soup with a paper airplane, I'm really not understanding how any of this is viable solution to implementing something like ruby on the BEAM VM. What would the performance hit be for using ETS for all your state? You'd just be better off using MRI for Ruby.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    You're the one that suggested it, but I'll bite: you might want to embed say ruby in BEAM if you wanted to take advantage of hashicorp terraform. Perhaps you want to support middleware or a query system in another language but have the bulk of your architecture be BEAM. You might want to deduplicate internal libraries shared between teams. You might want to use a 3rd party library written in one of these langs. You might want to transition between lang X and a beam lang and what you need is to leakily expose BEAM modules using shim code as an intermediate. You might just be crazy and want to do weird shit for fun.
  - quechimba 4y ago
    Why can't you have concurrency?