Running Erlang w/o an OS

[mml+erlquestions@REDACTED]

 > >wwas>project that had Erlang running in a FPGA w/o any OS support.  
 > >wwas>Does this sound familiar to anyone? I can't find any reference to

 > The first thing that went through my head after reading about Transmeta's 
 > Crusoe announcement was "Hmmm...I wonder if you could make it understand 
 > the BEAM opcodes?"  That might not actually be so far fetched.

For the original poster, the person working on the Erlang FPGA is
Robert Tjarnstrom. I'm not sure how much he'll say about what he's
doing, if you're really really interested send me some mail and I'll
dig up his email address.

I expect the main use of an Erlang ASIC (or FPGA) to be  part of a
system which includes a normal CPU with a normal Erlang node on it.
An operating system does, after all, provide some useful services like
IO. What does that look like if we switch to crusoe? I can imagine a
dual-CPU machine where one crusoe runs an instruction set suited to
Erlang and one runs something more ordinary.

When the Java virtual machine as specified, there was some hope that
Erlang could run in it quite easily. This was dampened a bit because
there are some things about the JVM which make life hard (I can't
remember what). Subsequently other people have shown that maybe it's
not so hard after all, e.g.

       Mobile Haskell: Compiling Lazy Functional Languages for the 
	      Java Virtual Machine by David Wakeling

	      http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~david/research/java.htm

Matthias