Wikipedia says "Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the original version, but the name may also be referred to as Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine, after Björn Gustavsson, who wrote and maintains the current version."
Whether the B is for Bogdan or Bjorn, there's something really fun and Space Quest-y about it.
The BEAM is fascinating for many reasons, including being register-based.
I really just wish the BEAM was portable in the way the JVM is. The BEAM hooks into so many system libraries, you must compile it on every flavor of linux instead of just unpacking a tarball.
This means you either must use your distro package manager's version, or compile from scratch. If you want to control the exact version that's being used across your team (via `asdf` or similar), this practically means you'll end up compiling the BEAM over and over...
Burrito works very well in my experience. I've used it for distributing an implementation of breakout in Elixir with OpenGL and Metal rendering backends as a binary. Pretty neat!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd still have to compile it from source on nix, no?
On my relatively powerful workstation, Erlang/BEAM takes about 7 minutes to compile.
We're working around this currently by having a fat devcontainer image, pre-built with Erlang inside (from source) by our CI. It chews through CI minutes unavoidably due to how docker layer caching works.
It would be awesome to just download and unpack a tarball, regardless of which distro you're using.
Nix is centered around the local Nix store and binary caching.
As long as the specific version of Erlang you’re using is present in either your Nix store or the global cache for your OS and arch (at cache.nixos.org), you should not need to compile anything.
And if you rely on custom builds, you can just setup your own binary cache. This is similar to remote caching in Bazel.
Nix is enormously complicated, kind of unstable and not well documented.
I get that if you've gone through the pain of learning it you get a system with some very nice properties. But casually suggesting "maybe try nix" is a bit like telling someone who wants to listen to Mozart "maybe try playing a piano".
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.
(Robert Virding or Bjärne Däcker might well have a copy of the Prolog code to share if asked nicely.)
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.
Nice. Have to spend some time reading it but i really like the minimalistic and clean design of your site content. No unnecessary colors/asides/verbiage/etc. nonsense but THE content and only the content presented directly.
A suggestion: Please add a "Overview" section in the beginning to provide the big-picture architecture since without that it would be hard to understand your code.
When can we be done with these cheap comments? It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post for people who don't know what the article is about. As the author often didn't submit their own article it is just a complaint with no possible resolution. Instead of taking a few seconds to find out what the article is about and maybe even clarifying it for your fellow readers, you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
If you can't bring yourself to search for 5 seconds and find out what an article is about, maybe you just close it and move on.
> I was always fascinated with BEAM (Bogdan Erlang Abstract Machine, a VM for languages like Erlang and Gleam) and how it allowed easy spawning of processes that didn’t share state, allowed for sending and selectively receiving messages, and linking to each other thus enabling creation of supervision trees.
That's all it takes. When you're writing about a niche topic (and nearly everything and anything interesting is a niche topic) then explain your jargon. It's considerate, reminds people who are familiar but might have forgotten, and introduces people unfamiliar with it to what your topic is.
Sometimes people want to understand what they're reading about and not have to play a little "guess what this is about" game. Clarity is a quality of good writing.
The tone in which people like the parent comment is disgraceful. I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed. It is respected and admired as a great piece of engineering to be studied by all hackers.
He wasn’t an ass about it. And the people who don’t know what BEAM is can easily google their way to more information than they’d ever be able to get from a comment here.
Edit: I will say that’s a better take. It’s at least blatant about it being the personal attack you intended it to be instead of passive aggressively couching it behind the pretense of caring about community. If you want to be shitty to people, just do it. I’d prefer honest assholes than weasely manipulators.
You're looking at where I told someone not be rude, and you're interpreting that as a personal attack from me? Because I "want to be shitty"? No.
And the mention of community is not a pretense. I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing. (This is separate from how easy it is to google.)
Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful" is much more personal than anything I said.
> You're looking at where I told someone not be rude
That’s just it, you didn’t tell them not to be rude. You hid behind nebulous shunning of “gatekeeping”.
>I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing
Again, you didn’t actually do that though, did you? Instead you used the term colloquially meant to signal they are creating a “hostile” environment
> Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful"
I’m distinctly not calling out personal attacks, I literally just gave you a thumbs up for doing it instead of taking the virtue signaling finger wagging approach you previously used.
"I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed." is being an ass to a lot of people.
Their tone was disgraceful, let me explain by giving you an example of how posts should be made.
“Hey! This looks interesting, quick search on Google didn’t explain what the BEAM is as well as I would like, can someone let me know what this is about in layman’s terms?”
This is inviting people to talk about the topic at hand. It puts the responsibility of knowing something squarely on the person who wants that information and it’s generally pleasant.
How the parent decided to phrase his desire for being spoon fed information was in fact disgraceful.
I still remember 14 years ago or so, when applied science posted his diy electron microscope build and a handful of top comments were low effort nerd snipes and criticisms.
Nothing to do about it, I don't think. Its the warty culture here.
I think its written for people who already know what the BEAM is. The BEAM is the VM for Erlang or Elixir, similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
A lot of people know that Beam is an open-source unified programming model for defining data processing pipeline, both batch and streaming (B[atch and Str]eam), in a way that’s portable across different execution engines. That's why people are asking to clarify what Beam is before sending us to watch the conference recordings.
Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?
I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.
This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
> I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page.
Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake.
We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains.
People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever.
Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
I feel like this is just an opportunity to either learn what it is or move on. That’s essentially what hn and “hacking” is, isn’t it? This post caught my eye because I was learning about BEAM just last week for the first time.
I have learnt to love and embrace the BEAM.
Wikipedia says "Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the original version, but the name may also be referred to as Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine, after Björn Gustavsson, who wrote and maintains the current version."
Whether the B is for Bogdan or Bjorn, there's something really fun and Space Quest-y about it.
I like to think the B stands for BEAM.
Very cliché.
Hey it’s a classic for a reason.
Same here! I also don't want "the facts to come in the way of a good story", and want to believe B is BEAM.
Sounds like it’s time for your nap.
The BEAM is fascinating for many reasons, including being register-based.
I really just wish the BEAM was portable in the way the JVM is. The BEAM hooks into so many system libraries, you must compile it on every flavor of linux instead of just unpacking a tarball.
This means you either must use your distro package manager's version, or compile from scratch. If you want to control the exact version that's being used across your team (via `asdf` or similar), this practically means you'll end up compiling the BEAM over and over...
You want https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito
This is very neat, thanks for the link!
Digging into it, you can get "universal" BEAM tarballs from here[1]. It links against muslibc and appears to bring it's own openssl. Very cool.
[1] https://beammachine.cloud/
Burrito works very well in my experience. I've used it for distributing an implementation of breakout in Elixir with OpenGL and Metal rendering backends as a binary. Pretty neat!
> The BEAM hooks into so many system libraries, you must compile it on every flavor of linux instead of just unpacking a tarball.
This isn't true, one can statically compile the BEAM for Linux exactly the same as the JVM. Here's an example: https://github.com/yoshi-monster/static_erlang/
Perhaps you should give Nix a try :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd still have to compile it from source on nix, no?
On my relatively powerful workstation, Erlang/BEAM takes about 7 minutes to compile.
We're working around this currently by having a fat devcontainer image, pre-built with Erlang inside (from source) by our CI. It chews through CI minutes unavoidably due to how docker layer caching works.
It would be awesome to just download and unpack a tarball, regardless of which distro you're using.
Nix is centered around the local Nix store and binary caching.
As long as the specific version of Erlang you’re using is present in either your Nix store or the global cache for your OS and arch (at cache.nixos.org), you should not need to compile anything.
And if you rely on custom builds, you can just setup your own binary cache. This is similar to remote caching in Bazel.
Some more details on Nix caching here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/caching/
Nix is enormously complicated, kind of unstable and not well documented.
I get that if you've gone through the pain of learning it you get a system with some very nice properties. But casually suggesting "maybe try nix" is a bit like telling someone who wants to listen to Mozart "maybe try playing a piano".
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.
(Robert Virding or Bjärne Däcker might well have a copy of the Prolog code to share if asked nicely.)
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.
Nice. Have to spend some time reading it but i really like the minimalistic and clean design of your site content. No unnecessary colors/asides/verbiage/etc. nonsense but THE content and only the content presented directly.
A suggestion: Please add a "Overview" section in the beginning to provide the big-picture architecture since without that it would be hard to understand your code.
PS: In case you didn't see it, my comment here mentions some documents that you might find useful for your implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883694
Maybe the post should explain what [a?] BEAM is, rather than invite the reader to go view a conference presentation recording.
When can we be done with these cheap comments? It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post for people who don't know what the article is about. As the author often didn't submit their own article it is just a complaint with no possible resolution. Instead of taking a few seconds to find out what the article is about and maybe even clarifying it for your fellow readers, you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
If you can't bring yourself to search for 5 seconds and find out what an article is about, maybe you just close it and move on.
> I was always fascinated with BEAM (Bogdan Erlang Abstract Machine, a VM for languages like Erlang and Gleam) and how it allowed easy spawning of processes that didn’t share state, allowed for sending and selectively receiving messages, and linking to each other thus enabling creation of supervision trees.
That's all it takes. When you're writing about a niche topic (and nearly everything and anything interesting is a niche topic) then explain your jargon. It's considerate, reminds people who are familiar but might have forgotten, and introduces people unfamiliar with it to what your topic is.
Sometimes people want to understand what they're reading about and not have to play a little "guess what this is about" game. Clarity is a quality of good writing.
The intended audience is Code BEAM Europe 2025 attendees.
Hey all, I've just added a paragraph about this. Thanks for the feedback.
> It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post
Has it actually? Why is this "tiring?"
> When can we be done with these cheap comments?
Do what most other people did. Write a cheap reply.
> you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
Just click the little [-].
> maybe you just close it and move on.
Ironic.
Agreed.
The tone in which people like the parent comment is disgraceful. I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed. It is respected and admired as a great piece of engineering to be studied by all hackers.
Disgraceful? It's a pretty polite request.
> hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed
This is some pretty intense gatekeeping, pal.
Can’t wait until we collectively drop whining about “gatekeeping”
I can phrase it a different way.
"Not everyone is you. Tons of experienced programmers and hackers don't know the name of the Erlang VM. Don't be an ass about it."
He wasn’t an ass about it. And the people who don’t know what BEAM is can easily google their way to more information than they’d ever be able to get from a comment here.
Edit: I will say that’s a better take. It’s at least blatant about it being the personal attack you intended it to be instead of passive aggressively couching it behind the pretense of caring about community. If you want to be shitty to people, just do it. I’d prefer honest assholes than weasely manipulators.
Oh you made an edit.
You're looking at where I told someone not be rude, and you're interpreting that as a personal attack from me? Because I "want to be shitty"? No.
And the mention of community is not a pretense. I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing. (This is separate from how easy it is to google.)
Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful" is much more personal than anything I said.
> You're looking at where I told someone not be rude
That’s just it, you didn’t tell them not to be rude. You hid behind nebulous shunning of “gatekeeping”.
>I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing
Again, you didn’t actually do that though, did you? Instead you used the term colloquially meant to signal they are creating a “hostile” environment
> Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful"
I’m distinctly not calling out personal attacks, I literally just gave you a thumbs up for doing it instead of taking the virtue signaling finger wagging approach you previously used.
"I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed." is being an ass to a lot of people.
Hey Dylan, you’re being an ass.
Their tone was disgraceful, let me explain by giving you an example of how posts should be made.
“Hey! This looks interesting, quick search on Google didn’t explain what the BEAM is as well as I would like, can someone let me know what this is about in layman’s terms?”
This is inviting people to talk about the topic at hand. It puts the responsibility of knowing something squarely on the person who wants that information and it’s generally pleasant.
How the parent decided to phrase his desire for being spoon fed information was in fact disgraceful.
I disagree, but I don’t think we’ll see eye-to-eye on much when it comes to the behavior of commentators
The curse of knowledge in this thread is mind boggling.
I didn't know what it was, so I used the grand information retrieval device I was already sitting at to look it up
I knew what the BEAM was, but in his defense, searching "BEAM" doesn't bring up anything relevant in the first few pages I looked at.
Hn has for the most part always been like this.
I still remember 14 years ago or so, when applied science posted his diy electron microscope build and a handful of top comments were low effort nerd snipes and criticisms.
Nothing to do about it, I don't think. Its the warty culture here.
I think its written for people who already know what the BEAM is. The BEAM is the VM for Erlang or Elixir, similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
> similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
I'm pretty sure that in this analogy, C# has the CLR.
A lot of people know that Beam is an open-source unified programming model for defining data processing pipeline, both batch and streaming (B[atch and Str]eam), in a way that’s portable across different execution engines. That's why people are asking to clarify what Beam is before sending us to watch the conference recordings.
I think there are plenty of context clues in the first few sentences.
> ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ...
> ... the appeal of BEAM languages ...
> ... haven’t read The BEAM Book yet ...
> ... examples are written in Elm ...
Those context clues do nothing for people who have no idea about BEAM but know about Beam and just think it's an uppercase version of it.
> ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ...
beam runner spawns worker processes very easily
> ... the appeal of BEAM languages ...
You can write Beam workflows in Java, Python, Go and Scala
> ... haven’t read The BEAM Book yet ...
https://www.amazon.com/Streaming-Systems-Where-Large-Scale-P...
> ... examples are written in Elm ...
Hm, maybe they added Elm SDK for the Beam, but why?...
That’s one reason Apache shouldn’t have used essentially the same name as a well-known VM released more than 20 years prior.
This feels like willful ignorance.
Can you really read the blog without realizing that there is a possibility this isn’t referring to Apache beam?
Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
Erlang isn't even that obscure.
There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title?
[1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/
Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?
I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.
This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
> I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page.
Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake.
We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains.
People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever.
Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
It’s poor writing.
> This is my Code BEAM Europe 2025 talk, converted to a blogpost.
The blog is a text version of the talk, not an invitation to watch the talk.
I feel like this is just an opportunity to either learn what it is or move on. That’s essentially what hn and “hacking” is, isn’t it? This post caught my eye because I was learning about BEAM just last week for the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)
The VM used for Erlang and Elixir.
...and Gleam.
...and LFE and Luerl and probably others that I'm forgetting.
I have an older list, but I don’t know how many of the links are still valid.
https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#alternative-languag...