[erlang-questions] BEAM backward compatibility

[Daniel Dormont]

On Jun 20, 2011, at 9:11 AM, Tim Watson wrote:

> 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.

Yeah, that's one of those things where the terminology gets confusing, but yes that's what I meant. thanks,

Dan