THE NEXT BIG small THING™

Gluon Erlang Abstract Machine

A configurable and small virtual machine which runs Erlang BEAM bytecode. Many simplifications have been made to keep code small at the cost of speed. The goal is to go smaller than several tens of kilobytes (oh well, under megabyte would be cool).

Features used in code can be configured at compile time when you want to squeeze VM into a particularly small platform.

The emulator

C++ implementation of minimalistic BEAM virtual machine. Located in emulator/. Has simple configurable feature settings in include/g_FEATURES.h (like distribution, float, bignum support etc). Note that (temporarily) some #define are duplicated as constants.

Building

Requires CMake, Clang (probably will work with GCC too?).

Run make in emulator/ directory. CMakeLists.txt will also work as a project with QtCreator IDE not to mention that CMake supports plenty of other IDEs (run cmake to see list of supported IDE, see cmake_linux.sh to get hint how to create a project for your IDE).

Features (Done)

• Processes, heaps and stack (no GC yet)
• Reductions and scheduling
• Message passing and infinite receiving (no timers and timed receive yet)
• Some BIFs (ever growing amount)
• Many opcodes, BEAM file loading and code path search

TODO

• Exceptions
• Process links, monitors
• Simple GC
• Binaries
• Floats maybe?

License

Apache v.2

Contributions not welcome until the project reaches POC phase (a working prototype).