AtomVM: Erlang virtual machine for IoT devices | Hacker News Reader

AtomVM: Erlang virtual machine for IoT devices

atomvm.org

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This is buried in the docs[0], but should be on the landing page:

At this time AtomVM will work on any board with a minimum of around 128k ram and 512k (1M recommended) flash.

This is the first thing I look for in any embedded software framework, and its rarely mentioned.

[0] https://www.atomvm.net/doc/master/getting-started-guide.html

How does this differ from Nerves?

Nerves is a framework meant to run on relatively beefy embedded systems (not microcontrollers) and uses the normal BEAM. AtomVM is its own VM suitable for running on microcontrollers in much more resource constrained environments than Nerves could ever get close to running on.

It'd be nice to have an 'at a glance' comparison between standard Erlang and this, to get a better idea of what's going on.

I don't know if "kind of like language X, but cut down and missing some stuff" environments have a great track record. Especially if the runtime is not the tried and true one with a lot of the kinks worked out.

Nerves doesn’t support microcontrollers, e.g. Raspberry Pico.

I think it's that AtomVM is erlang specific, while nerves is elixir and erlang. I could be very wrong, but that's my initial read from the docs

> I think it's that AtomVM is erlang specific

I see plenty of references to Elixir in the docs, and this official AtomVM project to provide some tooling to target AtomVM from Elixir

https://github.com/atomvm/ExAtomVM

As someone who's yet to play with Erlang and Elixir, is the bytecode lean or fluffy? Microcontrollers often have somewhat limited Flash storage, and I see they have 512kB as bare minimum with 1MB recommended for the VM itself.

Will that extra 512kB be enough for fun stuff?

Good question!

I'm not a BEAM developer, but a quick search found this [1] which was very informative. My classification would be "quite fluffy", but that's of course highly subjective and the language/platform has quite a lot of features that it needs to support so I wasn't expecting CHIP-8, exactly.

[1]: https://gomoripeti.github.io/beam_by_example/

It implements the BEAM, so any language that shares the runtime can be made to work (Elixir, Gleam, etc)

If I understand correctly, Elixir builds an Erlang syntax tree and then the erlang toolchain takes over. If it runs Erlang, it should be able to run elixir

I think you have it the other way around. Elixir is built on top of Erlang, no? So if it runs Elixir it can run Erlang in the same way React can run JavaScript, but not necessarily the other way around.

No, the GP is correct: Erlang and Elixir are 100% equivalent on the BEAM, because Elixir compiles to Erlang AST, then that is compiled with Erlang compiler to BEAM bytecode. I honestly don't know what you mean by the React example, but it's more like JavaScript and TypeScript, or Java and Kotlin. At runtime, there's no difference between the code compiled directly from Erlang and code compiled from Elixir.

Awesome project, keep up the good work! As an Erlang enthusiast I really want to give it a try but lack interesting project ideas and hardware.

I wish there were pictures of hardware on sample code/tutorials pages. Would be interested in seeing complete projects too.

Makes me happy seeing the BeamVM getting more usage! It deserves it.

I was hoping it had a REPL too but apparently it does not.

Standard REPL doesn’t work?

No, it would likely take a lot of flash space. There is a LISP like REPL.

I didn't see anything in the core APIs about cryptography so any application that requires encrypted communication will have to bring their own cryptographic primitives.

a fair amount of ciphers and hashes are listed here under the crypto module: https://www.atomvm.net/doc/master/apidocs/erlang/estdlib/cry...

Thanks.

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