BEAM (Erlang VM)

“no GC pause, and no worry that a single resource heavy process is going to slow down everything else”

“BEAM is wonderful in its own way, but it's not even in the same performance class as Go.”

“I used it to make an art installation above a coffee table for my company’s lobby.”

“it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted”

“Having independent memory space for a process allows you to free it safely when work is done”

“It probably doesn’t get a place in the rotation based on their own description of its performance”

“BEAM VM is not that performant and programs also take more memory compared to Go.”

“you might want to give it a deeper look. There are no threads there, at least not OS threads on the developer's disposal.”

“the combination of the BEAM runtime and the guardrails that you get with an Elixir project”

“BEAM processes are so lightweight that you can do that, which gives each one isolation from misbehavior of the others.”

“the BEAM will let you have hundreds of thousands of processes sat around doing nothing quite happily”

“distributed processes where you can connect several nodes to each other very seamlessly”

“happens to be the perfect choice for agents and orchestration of multi-agent systems”

“I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.”

“LLMs have been pretty clever at using fancy types with libraries like Servant and Beam.”

“The one primitive I wish we had but (outside BEAM) don't is object coloring.”

“the JVM and the BEAM are still better able to handle the types of high-traffic, high-concurrency workloads”

“It slows the runtime down a shitload (and the BEAM is already in the bottom half of interpreted language runtimes by speed)”

“I've seen firsthand that you can in fact bring a BEAM VM to its knees if you expose it just like that to the net.”

“the strengths of Erlang BEAM VM and Golang's runtime nullify their weaknesses”

“it's better to start with something that's more reliable than you might strictly need”

“BEAM gives it to you for free, and you don't rely on an Internet-scale monopoly to run it.”

“lightweight processes with isolated heaps and per-process garbage collection”

“I've not found anything else that makes them easier to deal with than BEAM though.”

“when something crashes at 3am, it comes back clean instead of corrupting the rest of the system”

“Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds”

“BEAM offers concrete benefits for agent frameworks: cheap preemptible processes, OTP behaviors like GenServer and Supervisor”

“I've run Erlang nodes with millions of processes, and I don't think that's feasible with OS processes.”

“its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors”

“Tabs have explicit states (active, warm, suspended), so inactive tabs are unloaded to save memory”

“Beam is mind-blowing and IMO such a sleeper that I can't wait for people to try.”

“the isolation provides a fault tolerance not seen in wide use until Kubernetes”

“BEAM that can have processes crash all day long and still continue to work”

“The first two I've never found to be fully replicated anywhere other than in OTP/BEAM.”

“it is the perfect balance between cooperative and preemptive multitasking”

“It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying”

“The BEAM VM executing bytecode is slower than a compiled binary.”

“BEAM does not have that level of single-threaded performance”

“BEAM builds into it a number of the features for which we use orchestration, observability, just simpler and (generally) more flexible.”

“BEAM's extremely high performance was only in one isolated thing, not high performance across the board.”