Erlang Micro Edition.

[Alex Arnon]

Thank you all very much for your answers. I see that every one of you
sees it somewhat differently - this is very interesting, and more
opinions would be most welcome :)
Christophe, I was thinking more along the lines of trying to assess
how large/heavy a ground-up rebuild of a VM that will be as simple as
possible, with a minimum of BIFs and features. As Joe said, bignums
will probably be out (though at least 32-bit integers must be
supported), and as James suggested the library layout might be
different. The thing is that it is difficult for me to assess the
scope of such a project right now - I am not familiar with the
operation of the VM, or even with the file format/bytecodes (though I
have browsed a bit through docs and the code... does anyone have
"proper", up-to-date documentation?).
My gut feeling tells me that a ground-up rewrite is necessary:
- Portability and embeddability.
- As Christophe suggested, make support for low-level services (BIFs)
a config-time selection.
- Tighter control of operation. E.g. memory management strategy could
be compile-time selectable.
- A chance to find that minimal closure of functionality that a small
embedded system would need.


Cheers,
Alex.