[erlang-questions] How small could an Erlang emulator be?

[jm]

ok wrote:
> On 13 Mar 2007, at 2:38 am, Bjorn Gustavsson wrote:
> 
>> "Joe Armstrong" <erlang@REDACTED> writes:
>>
>>> So if we threw out bignums and floats and designed a very compact  
>>> object
>>> code - (huffman) then it could be very small.
>> The Beam code is quite compact before it is loaded. It would be  
>> possible
>> to implement an alternate loader that would load the code in more  
>> compact
>> way (at the expense of speed).
> 
> The point was not "how small could  compiled Erlang code be",
> but "how small could the EMULATOR be".  On these network processors,
> there could be up to 8MB to hold the compiled Erlang code, but only
> 2 k-instructions for the EMULATOR.
> 
> In particular, a "very compact object code" would make the compiled  
> code smaller
> (which wouldn't help) at the expense of making the EMULATOR much more  
> complex
> (which would hurt a lot).  In fact, I was thinking that Quintus-style  
> 16-bit threaded code
> would probably be a good idea, requiring a minimum of decoding.
> 
Are there any on-line references? It could help to see a diagram or two
of the architecturea and the data sheet. I get the impression that it's,
shall we say, inspired by the cell processor.


Jeff.