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Comment by mikl | Hacker News Reader

The reason Erlang (and Elixir) are interesting are not the languages themselves (although Elixir is a very nice language in my opinion), but the runtime behind them, BEAM.

The BEAM is the brainchild of the excellent engineers at Ericsson, the product of decades of R&D into building performant, scalable and reliable software for their telephony products.

It scales like a dream, runs your application on all available cores with no trouble at all, handles massive amounts of concurrent requests without breaking a sweat. The programming techniques it enables with projects like Phoenix LiveView are unique and powerful.

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What's the license for the BEAM runtime? I've found that Erland and Elixir are both Apache License, but I can't find out whether the bytecode they generate can be executed in a fully open source environment.

AFAIK, BEAM is developed within the erlang/otp, so the license is Apache License 2.0.

Not sure why bytecode generated by a APLv2 project couldn't be executed in a fully open source environment.

I have no idea either but it has a whiff of Oracle to it.

It's Apache 2.0

Reference: https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/erts/AUTHORS

Does "BEAM" mean anything / is an acronym?

Originally “Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine”, but then the subsequent maintainer was named Björn so you could sub that in too.

IIRC Joe Armstrong said he was puzzled why people latched on to the term "BEAM" so much, and he preferred that it was simply referred to as the Erlang VM.

Beam, with one syllable, is more convenient to say out loud than Erlang VM. It also sounds cooler.

In fact, it sounds awesome!

And the predecessor to BEAM was JAM (Joe’s) which is a bit of a shame we didn’t end up with that acronym… or not, I guess.

While the BEAM is the real magic, the languages (Erlang and later Elixir) are designed specifically to enable that. You can't just decouple the two.

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