BEAM There, Done That with Maxim Kharchenko on Ling - a from-scratch Erlang VM for Xen, no OS required.
Two technical details for this community:
Instruction set. The final instruction level isn’t fixed. LING ingests OTP and standard library source, generates specialized opcodes for frequent patterns, and balances the tradeoff against VM binary size growth.
Memory discipline. No allocation lacks an explicit out-of-memory handler. Whole-system property, maintained across the entire codebase.
Part of a broader project - described by Francesco - to run an entire network stack as an Erlang application. The model was right. The timing wasn’t. The problems have since reappeared as unikernels, eBPF, and related approaches.
LING’s source is on GitHub for anyone who wants to go deeper.
