- Took a while to find out what BEAM was. It's the run-time interpreter for Erlang.[1]
It's not in Acronym Finder. There are many hits for BEAM, but this isn't in the top 10.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)
- Not just Erlang, but all the other languages like Elixir (powers Discord), Gleam and others.
- I guess you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 (as per XKCD).
I’ve never really looked into Erlang or other similar languages, but it’s come up often enough on HN that I know of BEAM.
- To learn more about Erlang, OP needs only look back at the threads on the day HN went Erlang-mad:
- Congratulations
- Highlights (emphasis mine):
> Open source maintainers can request a free license by emailing safe@erlang-solutions.com and including a link to their [GitHub] repository. Once approved, we provide a SAFE license for one month or up to a year, depending on the project’s needs, at no cost.
The legalese[1] (is incoherent but apparently) does not pass the Curl test, that is, the maintainer of Curl—who gets money by providing commercial support for his completely FOSS project—wouldn’t be allowed to use this had it applied to him:
> You can only use SAFE for open-source software. Any commercial use is prohibited.
[1] https://www.erlang-solutions.com/policies/safe-for-open-sour...
- The point you're trying to make about Curl is more unclear than anything in that license.
- It’s a reference to a four-year-old discussion[1] in the Curl bug tracker about Travis CI introducing a similar prohibition on commercial activity in relation to open-source projects. The more general point is, fully open-source projects that earn money via support contracts are few and precious, and it’s a dick move to cut them off.
- I've seen BEAM mentioned several times on here in the last few months. Is there some sort of thing going on with erlang that I'm out of the loop on?
- Erlang/BEAM/Elixir stuff shows up on the front page of Hacker News pretty often, I'd say at least once per month.
Elixir was a HN darling a few years back. Publicity has somewhat waned since then.
To answer your question, I would say "no", that no particularly interesting things have emerged from that community lately. Just more stuff happened to make it to the front page. (That is not to say anything bad of the BEAM community, just that I see nothing particularly outstanding of late which would warrant such a claim.)
I would say the most recent newsworthy events would include:
- The Erlang `:ssh` module had a serious CVE that required an immediate upgrade for anyone using it.
- Gleam, a BEAM language with static typing, had a v1.0 release.
- Phoenix LiveView also reached v1.0.
- Elixir is making steady progress on the implementation of a static type system, using a novel "set theoretic" type system.
Overall, I would say that the ecosystem as a whole is progressing slowly but steadily.
- > is progressing slowly but steadily
This is one of the things that has made me like Elixir so much. Every time I update my Android or Apple apps with a few months in between, I have to figure out what things they've thrown in the language now.
The Elixir community seems to be less in search of "what's the hot programmer item that we have to have this week" and instead be more at peace with it's simple approach to computing, and just work off of that.
Slow and Steady is nice these days; better than Hot and Volatile.
- + both Gleam and Elixir were in top 3 most admired langs in the latest SO survey, adds to the hype
- There is Erlang-Red[1] that is bring a visual flow based programming approach to Erlang.
That’s something new in the Erlang world.
- Neat project, and I think erlang (or its offshoots, like elixir) are great candidates for this sort of thing.
That said, I take issue with this:
>is great for creating data flows that actually describe concurrent processing, it is just a shame the NodeJS is single threaded
Its not really true, there are `worker_threads`[0] as well as a cluster process module[1] for multi processing.
The nodejs runtime has really come a long way here. Though, it is true that by default, its single threaded, and one could argue, and I'd agree with it, that its much easier to do multi process / multi threaded work on the BEAM since it was built with this in mind from the get go.
Never the less, its not so true that NodeJS is limited to a single thread!
- Thank you for the clarification :+1:
I think you said it yourself in that by default NodeJS is single threaded so the mystic remains even if it’s not true.
What would be a fun project would be to make worker threads as seamless as processes are in Erlang. Ie back-port all the ideas of Erlang to NodeJs and then implement something like Erlang Red on top of that!
Another example is that Erlang Red, which based on Node-Red, has supervisor nodes that implement the supervisor behaviour. These nodes could now be backported to Node Red so that it would also have the supervisor behaviour in NodeJS.
- Whenever Erlang is the topic, BEAM is not far off. It is like Java and JVM.
- Is it just me or does the font look really stretched out on the site?
- That's just the normal look of the font they are using (which I'm not a fan of either if that's what you're implying)
- [dead]
89 points by todsacerdoti 1 day ago | 20 comments