Comment by macintux
13 hours ago
Now I'm curious whether Joe Armstrong's original Prolog implementation of the VM is available anywhere, but I doubt it.
13 hours ago
Now I'm curious whether Joe Armstrong's original Prolog implementation of the VM is available anywhere, but I doubt it.
Joe used to have all that code in his world-readable NFS-mounted home directory. He would just create a new directory for every idea or project. Take it with him from one computer to the next.
I hope that's preserved and one day published as e.g. the old MIT AI lab file system snapshots were.
The next best thing : Implementing a Functional Language for Highly Parallel Real Time Applications by J.L.Armstrong et al. (pdf) - https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/joe-armstrong/erl... Seems like this is the design behind the original JAM VM. The "References" section cites more early work.
See also The Erlang BEAM Virtual Machine Specification by the OG Bogumil Hausman himself ! Note: This document describes BEAM as it was in 1997. BEAM has grown and changed significantly between then and the time this note was added (2012). This information is mainly for historical interest. - https://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html
Together, they should provide a lot of insights into ERTS/BEAM.