I never used Erlang, and I'm a functional programming fan. But languages based on heavy VM that abstract OS away always make me doubt that's the right direction.
That's not a crazy instinct, and maybe if OSs were better you would even be right, but there's not really another way to get a skrillion communicating processes that can all crash/fail independently. Without a dedicated VM, all the other approaches are either less safe or too inefficient.
I consider BEAM an indication of a direction that OSs could and maybe should move. It's even possible to run BEAM on bare metal, (almost?) entirely in place of the normal OS.
It's almost like an OS in itself and initially designed to be like a more capable and robust OS on top of rather constrained computers. In my experience it's trivial to shell or port out to the environment when I want to, and I also see people that I don't think of as highly skilled low-level programmers do things with NIF:s so that can't be exceptionally demanding either.
andrewflnr|5 months ago
I consider BEAM an indication of a direction that OSs could and maybe should move. It's even possible to run BEAM on bare metal, (almost?) entirely in place of the normal OS.
linkdd|5 months ago
How? With a unikernel?
cess11|5 months ago
It's almost like an OS in itself and initially designed to be like a more capable and robust OS on top of rather constrained computers. In my experience it's trivial to shell or port out to the environment when I want to, and I also see people that I don't think of as highly skilled low-level programmers do things with NIF:s so that can't be exceptionally demanding either.
conradfr|5 months ago
It's actually quite lean.
It will use all your cores without you asking (which is fantastic right?) but it's configurable AFAIK.