[erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

[Mikael Pettersson]

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 10:33 PM, joe mcguckin <joe@REDACTED> wrote:
> Does anyone know if the BEAM vm has ever been implemented directly in hardware (e.g. in an FPGA)?

Not the BEAM that I know of, but Ericsson has had at least one project
to implement an "Erlang processor" (via different presumably simpler
VMs).

Apart from the usual problems of synthesizing a processor, you also
have to consider:
- there's a lot of implicit state and semantics in the BEAM
instructions, so you'd have to duplicate things like processes,
dynamic memory allocation, garbage collection, exception handling,
message passing, process links, etc
- the BIFs, without which you can't do much, at a minimum you'd need
networking support

Microcoded HW implementations of LISP and Smalltalk were popular in
the 70s and early 80s, but were quickly replaced by SW running on
RISCs with higher performance, lower cost, and quicker updates.

I'm not sure for what use case a HW Erlang makes sense (except as an
intellectual exercise).