New BEAM There, Done That with Maxim Kharchenko, creator of Ling - not a BEAM fork, a clean Erlang VM implementation running on Xen with no kernel underneath.
Two design details worth discussing:
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Dynamic instruction set. Ling analyzes real OTP source and generates specialized opcodes tuned to that workload. Frequently loaded constants get their own instructions. Tradeoff managed by heuristic - more instructions means slower dispatch.
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Zero silent memory failures. Every allocation has an explicit out-of-memory handler. Whole-system discipline, not a convention.
Context from Francesco: this was part of a project to run an entire network stack in Erlang - firmware, controller, everything. The industry wasn’t ready. The problems, as he puts it, came back with different names.
