23 Aug, 2009, Silenus wrote in the 1st comment:
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Has anyone here studied the Erlang VM and figured out how it works?
23 Aug, 2009, Erok wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I think you've mentioned Ericsson's erlang several times, and I'm curious why?

It originated decades ago in the telecom world (like Nortel's protel language) and hasn't gained traction outside of it as far as I know. The products that use it are likely old legacy voice switches and peripherals. Is there another niche where it's found a home?
23 Aug, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Erlang is used in several concurrent systems; the Wikipedia page gives a few examples. I'm not convinced how many good answers will be obtained here, though, as relatively few people here have heard of Erlang, and even few people have used it; relatively few people have studied VMs and probably even fewer of this already very small number have studied Erlang's VM in particular. Maybe proglang forums would be more appropriate.
24 Aug, 2009, Kintar wrote in the 4th comment:
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Erok said:
It originated decades ago in the telecom world (like Nortel's protel language) and hasn't gained traction outside of it as far as I know.


Just for the sake of pointless trivia, there's a very nice free 3d subdivision modeler called Wings 3D that's developed in Erlang. :)
24 Aug, 2009, Silenus wrote in the 5th comment:
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I am interested in studying the language as a potential model for concurrent language design since I am working on a compiler system for a custom language of my own devising. I will check to see if there is some sort of Erlang mailing list or something. I am just wondering if it is at all possible to pair this with the LLVM JIT system or if i would have to hack the LLVM JIT to get this to work since any naive implementation I can think of would be extremely inefficient.
24 Aug, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 6th comment:
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"Extremely inefficient" is relative, as always. It might turn out to be far more that sufficiently efficient for the purpose you have in mind. Considerable inefficiency in relative terms did not prevent Ruby from becoming very popular and widely used, for example.
24 Aug, 2009, Silenus wrote in the 7th comment:
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You might be right David. I guess the tricky bit might be making the JIT behave in a pre-emptive manner by inserting additional instructions into the routine (maybe at call points and backward branches) and "somehow" saving the stack. I guess this for me is mainly at the thought experiment stage and I may not incorporate it into the compiler I am working on. It seems a little bit too complex for a first take at this.
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