BEAM There, Done That with Björn Gustavsson- Why did “compile Erlang to native C” lose to bytecode, even though it was 10-20x faster on paper?

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New BEAM There, Done That with Björn Gustavsson (OTP team since 1996) on the BEAM’s early history: JAM, Virding’s V (defeated by a shared global heap once CPU caching became essential), and Bogdan’s original BEAM, which Björn took over in 1997.

Also: the compiler bug that led to the BEAM Validator, and the BEAM loader Björn invented that’s still in use today.

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