[erlang-questions] Erlang VM in Rust

[zxq9]

On 2017年09月13日 水曜日 00:27:00 Loïc Hoguin wrote:
> Any thoughts on the benefits existing Erlang programs would get from a 
> VM implemented in Rust?
> 
> It may or may not simplify working on the VM and may or may not make it 
> more solid. But what would it improve for the programs written in Erlang 
> themselves?

In an ideal world, nothing. I would hope that the only benefit to
those coding in Erlang is that maintenance would become more of a sure
thing for the OTP maintainers and that, in particular, new feature
implementation and performance improvements would become more obvious
and safer to implement over time. Those benefits would be beneficial
only indirectly.

That said... I really can't imagine such a large, old, well documented,
well explored runtime known to such a large team would be rewritten to
a new language. I can imagine that some of us (probably including some
of the OTP team itself) would enjoy working on a rewrite in Rust that
is an alternative to, but not a replacement for, the current runtime.

Competing runtimes occasionally expose hidden benefits. But a blanket
replacement would be a massive, end-of-Netscape type upheaval. It is
not as though Erlang is implemented in an obfuscated style of C++ that
suffers from fundamental structure and human incompatability issues.

-Craig