I think we're coming at things from sufficiently different angles that it's not really necessary to merge our projects, other than perhaps some common parts that could benefit from that kind of sharing. Enigma is really a faithful reimplementation of the VM in Rust; while Lumen is an ahead-of-time compiler, which requires a very different approach.

I think the goal of Enigma in making the BEAM architecture easier to understand, and providing a great learning platform for getting involved in working on the BEAM itself, or just on Enigma as an alternative is a great idea, and something I know I wish I had been able to have on hand when I was trying to understand the deep inner workings of the BEAM implementation. I if Enigma was only ever that, it would still be worth the effort spent on it.

Lumen does have parts that could likely be shared with projects like Enigma - namely the high-level IR we use in the frontend (EIR, Erlang Intermediate Representation). That IR could be used in any Rust-based VM/compiler targeting Erlang, or an Erlang-derived language, and work there would directly benefit downstream consumers of the IR in terms of better optimization, etc. We've also put work into our term representation, and various parts of the runtime, like reproducing the core parts of the BEAM garbage collector, etc. While some of those things are intertwined with the compiler, much of it could be easily extracted and used elsewhere.