[erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

[Mike French]

It probably makes more sense to do a software implementation on a platform that is somewhat isomorphic to the Erlang abstractions of independent processes and message passing - maybe VxWorks. 

Whatever happened to the Parallella port?

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED [mailto:erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Mikael Pettersson
Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2018 1:18 PM
To: joe mcguckin <joe@REDACTED>
Cc: erlang-questions <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

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).
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