[erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

[Dmytro Lytovchenko]

There is no known hardware implementation because the original BEAM
158-instruction set is quite complex to load, parse and interpret, and the
runtime part of hardware to support built-ins and data types would be
pretty massive. But it might be possible if you simplify the opcode set,
simplify the memory structure (to save on bit manipulations) similar to
Python or Java memory model, and shrink it to something that is possible to
hard-wire.

So yes, some _hobby_ work on that was done by me without a significant
result: it turned out to be massive amount of work, without a commercial
project, and without any particular goal - it becomes really hard to focus
on the topic and to keep going. Essentially I worked on compressed
instructions and reduced instruction set (here
https://github.com/kvakvs/E4VM ), after some success I left the project,
tried implementing a normal BEAM VM in software (
https://github.com/kvakvs/ErlangRT ) and now trying another one for
simplified memory model and compiling to machine code (
https://github.com/kvakvs/ErlangAoT ).

On Sat, 1 Sep 2018 at 22:45, joe mcguckin <joe@REDACTED> wrote:

> Does anyone know if the BEAM vm has ever been implemented directly in
> hardware (e.g. in an FPGA)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joe
>
>
> Joe McGuckin
> ViaNet Communications
>
> joe@REDACTED
> 650-207-0372 cell
> 650-213-1302 office
> 650-969-2124 fax
>
>
>
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