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Writing your own BEAM

martin.janiczek.cz

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Re: Writing your own BEAM

#31

Post by jabbywocker »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #29
jabbywocker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn’t an ass about it. And the people who don’t know what BEAM is can easily google their way to more information than they’d ever be able to get from a comment here. Edit: I will say that’s a better take. It’s at least blatant about it being the personal attack you intended it to be instead of passive aggressively couching it behind the pretense of caring about community. If you want to be shitty to people, just…

"I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed." is being an ass to a lot of people.

I disagree, but I don’t think we’ll see eye-to-eye on much when it comes to the behavior of commentators

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#32

Post by jedmeyers »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #23
hatefulheart wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The tone in which people like the parent comment is disgraceful. I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed. It is respected and admired as a great piece of engineering to be studied by all hackers.

Disgraceful? It's a pretty polite request. > hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed This is some pretty intense gatekeeping, pal.

The curse of knowledge in this thread is mind boggling.

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#33

Post by Dylan16807 »

jabbywocker wrote: post #27
Dylan16807 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He wasn’t an ass about it. And the people who don’t know what BEAM is can easily google their way to more information than they’d ever be able to get from a comment here. Edit: I will say that’s a better take. It’s at least blatant about it being the personal attack you intended it to be instead of passive aggressively couching it behind the pretense of caring about community. If you want to be shitty to people, just…

Oh you made an edit.

You're looking at where I told someone not be rude, and you're interpreting that as a personal attack from me? Because I "want to be shitty"? No.

And the mention of community is not a pretense. I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing. (This is separate from how easy it is to google.)

Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful" is much more personal than anything I said.

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#34

Post by Alupis »

The BEAM is fascinating for many reasons, including being register-based.

I really just wish the BEAM was portable in the way the JVM is. The BEAM hooks into so many system libraries, you must compile it on every flavor of linux instead of just unpacking a tarball.

This means you either must use your distro package manager's version, or compile from scratch. If you want to control the exact version that's being used across your team (via `asdf` or similar), this practically means you'll end up compiling the BEAM over and over...

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#37

Post by Jtsummers »

jedmeyers wrote: post #30
Jtsummers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title? [1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/

Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.

> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?

I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.

This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#38

Post by macintux »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #36
Alupis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and Gleam.

...and LFE and Luerl and probably others that I'm forgetting.

I have an older list, but I don’t know how many of the links are still valid.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#alternative-languag...

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#39

Post by rramadass »

macintux wrote: post #2

Now I'm curious whether Joe Armstrong's original Prolog implementation of the VM is available anywhere, but I doubt it.

The next best thing : Implementing a Functional Language for Highly Parallel Real Time Applications by J.L.Armstrong et al. (pdf) - https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/joe-armstrong/erl... Seems like this is the design behind the original JAM VM. The "References" section cites more early work.

See also The Erlang BEAM Virtual Machine Specification by the OG Bogumil Hausman himself ! Note: This document describes BEAM as it was in 1997. BEAM has grown and changed significantly between then and the time this note was added (2012). This information is mainly for historical interest. - https://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html

Together, they should provide a lot of insights into ERTS/BEAM.

Re: Writing your own BEAM

#40

Post by rramadass »

Nice. Have to spend some time reading it but i really like the minimalistic and clean design of your site content. No unnecessary colors/asides/verbiage/etc. nonsense but THE content and only the content presented directly.

A suggestion: Please add a "Overview" section in the beginning to provide the big-picture architecture since without that it would be hard to understand your code.

PS: In case you didn't see it, my comment here mentions some documents that you might find useful for your implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883694

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