4 ms·
The reason Erlang (and Elixir) are interesting are not the languages themselves (although Elixir is a very nice language in my opinion), but the runtime behind
by mikl 4y ago
The reason Erlang (and Elixir) are interesting are not the languages themselves (although Elixir is a very nice language in my opinion), but the runtime behind them, BEAM.
The BEAM is the brainchild of the excellent engineers at Ericsson, the product of decades of R&D into building performant, scalable and reliable software for their telephony products.
It scales like a dream, runs your application on all available cores with no trouble at all, handles massive amounts of concurrent requests without breaking a sweat. The programming techniques it enables with projects like Phoenix LiveView are unique and powerful.
- gjvc 4y agoDoes "BEAM" mean anything / is an acronym?
- glenngillen 4y agoOriginally “Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine”, but then the subsequent maintainer was named Björn so you could sub that in too.
- sodapopcan 4y agoAnd the predecessor to BEAM was JAM (Joe’s) which is a bit of a shame we didn’t end up with that acronym… or not, I guess.
- frou_dh 4y agoIIRC Joe Armstrong said he was puzzled why people latched on to the term "BEAM" so much, and he preferred that it was simply referred to as the Erlang VM.
- andsoitis 4y agoBeam, with one syllable, is more convenient to say out loud than Erlang VM. It also sounds cooler.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoIn fact, it sounds awesome!
- TuringTest 4y agoWhat's the license for the BEAM runtime? I've found that Erland and Elixir are both Apache License, but I can't find out whether the bytecode they generate can be executed in a fully open source environment.
- capableweb 4y agoAFAIK, BEAM is developed within the erlang/otp, so the license is Apache License 2.0. Not sure why bytecode generated by a APLv2 project couldn't be executed in a fully open source environment.
- tempest_ 4y agoI have no idea either but it has a whiff of Oracle to it.
- frellus 4y agoIt's Apache 2.0 Reference: https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/erts/AUTHORS https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/erts/AUTHORS
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoWhile the BEAM is the real magic, the languages (Erlang and later Elixir) are designed specifically to enable that. You can't just decouple the two.
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]