A brief history of Erlang's BEAM compiler (2018)

10 months ago

The first version of Erlang was implemented in Prolog in 1986.
JAM (Joe’s Abstract Machine) was created in 1989, making Erlang 70 times faster.
TEAM (Turbo Erlang Abstract Machine) compiled Erlang to C but was slow and produced large binaries.
BEAM (Bogdan’s Erlang Abstract Machine) was a hybrid machine executing both native and threaded code.
VEE (Virding’s Erlang Engine) used a single shared heap but didn't improve speed over JAM.
OTP R1B was released in 1996, marking the industrialization of Erlang.
BEAM/C was eventually dropped due to complexity and bugs.
The BEAM instruction set was simplified and stabilized using the beam_makeops script.
OTP R5 introduced the modern BEAM file format and dropped JAM support.
Kernel Erlang was introduced in R6B, improving optimizations.
Core Erlang was introduced in R7B as a new intermediate format.

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