firefly

I think it is Firefly's approach (https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly). They put a lot of work into it, but never made it fully functional, and it's not maintained anymore. So I agree that you get smaller binaries this way, but I believe we can get to acceptable sizes too, without creating and maintaining a custom compiler.

Are you thinking of this, formerly known as Lumen? https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly AFAIK it's been mothballed and one of the major contributors seems to have left the BEAM ecosystem altogether. They're doing Ethereum-ish smart-contract-ish stuff now. The other top contributor looks to have pulled way back from OSS dev of any kind.

There are details on this also: https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly#runtime Generally it should be assumed that actors and their concurrency model is fully supported as that is a part of the core semantics for BEAM languages.

See the about section: https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly#about-firefly > The primary motivator for Firefly's development was the ability to compile Elixir applications that could target WebAssembly, enabling use of Elixir as a language for frontend development. It is also possible to use Firefly to target other platforms as well, by producing self-contained executables on platforms such as x86.

Add to that GC implementation is different for each language, so having generic garbage collector might not be desirable. Consider Erlang which supports millions of processes per node: > Each Erlang process has its own stack and heap which are allocated in the same memory block and grow towards each other. When the stack and the heap meet, the garbage collector is triggered and memory is reclaimed. If not enough memory was reclaimed, the heap will grow. That said, there is a WebAssembly compiler for Erlang: https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly

https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly ^ Theres tradeoffs but its certainly interesting. How long does the fireflyVM, (written in rust,) take to start once it hits the browser?

Apparently it has feature parity with the BEAM, but lacks support for NIFs https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly#runtime

I think this project used to be called Lumen until pretty recently - https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly

Here's website and source code of Firefly: https://getfirefly.org/ https://github.com/GetFirefly/firefly#about-firefly

Neat! Something, something, Greenspun but Erlang. You should check out Lumen. Not to dissuade you at all, but doesn't making a new language greatly limit who can use your platform? Or was it on purpose so that only frolicking goat angels can fly through the eye of a needle? BTW, would love to see a higher resolution image of your logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://github.com/lumen/lumen

The BEAM (runtime?) is written in C. There is also an effort to rewrite it in Rust (https://github.com/lumen/lumen). Some functions are built into the VM but most of the supporting 'standard library' (OTP / Open Telecom Platform) is written in Erlang. The (main) compiler is written in C. So it's all C or Erlang afaik. It is ported to every major flavour of OS. I don't know what 'back end' means in this context.

If I recall correctly, Saša Jurić mentioned in an interview that he envisions the BEAM being used as an OS in the future, where you can run your database, web server and other services under one VM. While I don't personally have much use for it (at the moment), I'm curious about how this would look like with Lumen [0] where you can run your whole web stack with a single binary and being internally supervised by the BEAM. Lumen's development has been slow but I remember seeing a tweet from a team member stating that development is slowly ramping back up (not a criticism in any way, just providing some context). [0] https://github.com/lumen/lumen

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25160700 see also, https://github.com/lumen/lumen