[erlang-questions] VM & BEAM Specs

[Tim Becker]

> The BEAM file format is documented.
>
> The VM is not.
>
>    | The internals of the BEAM file format are described on Björn's
>    | homepage . Eventually this will/might include a description of the
>    | virtual machine's instructions.
>    | http://erlang.org/faq/faq.html
>
> Björn's homepage is, of course, http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/

I've had a look at this the other day (to play around with .beam
files), and it's a bit dated (May 2000). At the very least, the
"Abstract Code" chunk isn't described, I've only implemented a cursory
beam dump, so I don't know if other bits are left out as well.

You can glean some information from the lib/compiler/src/beam_asm.erl,
beam_disasm.erl and /lib/stdlib/src/beam_lib.erl implementations.

   -tim