[erlang-questions] BEAM backward compatibility

[Tim Watson]

On 19 June 2011 05:23, Daniel Dormont <dan@REDACTED> wrote:
> Since I work mostly in Java, when I started learning Erlang I recognized
> .beam files as being  at least somewhat like .class files and assumed they
> would be backward compatible - that is, beams compiled in R12 would run in
> R13 and R14 and there shouldn't be any problems unless I were calling
> experimental APIs or deprecated APIs that were later removed. But a
> discussion on the ejabberd mailing list suggested that this might not be the
> case. I didn't see anything offhand in the official documentation. What's
> the word on this?

Java byte code is forwards compatible, rather than backwards, which is
what you're describing.