[erlang-questions] Erlang VM in Rust

[Paul Oliver]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 10:42 AM zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Large C projects can potentially be rewritten in Rust gradually. An example
of this can be found in Remacs (
http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/01/11/announcing-remacs-porting-emacs-to-rust/
).
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