Hacker News Reader

Comment by hazn | Hacker News Reader

what piqued my interest: nerves boots with only barebones linux and the otp/beam vm, effectively turning elixir into the embedded os [0]

[0] https://wiki.alopex.li/NervesNotes

View on HN

There's a maniac/genius who made the BEAM VM boot directly on some hardware through his GRiSP project: https://www.grisp.org/

Hard real-time Erlang. It's siiiick.

I've wondered about something related and the origin of Erlang in the 80s/90s. Back then when it was running on the telephone switches etc, was it running bare metal? Or did those switches run an OS like some form of Unix or something else?

I'm pretty sure it ran on VRTX.

He automated some Rexroth production with it.

https://www.stritzinger.com

Not to downplay it or anything, but it is "just" the normal Erlang BEAM VM compiled together with the real time OS RTEMS (which basically implements all POSIX things that the VM needs). Of course, getting it to work needed a lot of research and and experimentation, but the end result is surprisingly simple for what it is. The maniac/genius part is coming up with the idea in the first place and actually pushing through until it works, not many people have the stamina and focus for that.

Source: I was part of the original core team, and I developed the first version of the Erlang support library and runtime.

I guess I’ve been a bit disappointed Nerves doesn’t run on microcontrollers, though, such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico. Basically, once you have Linux, you can run nearly anything already.

It was never intended to. The BEAM is not a good fit for that environment. I find it a bit bewildering that people are disappointed about that but I think it comes from having had the difference between microcontroller and embedded linux device clear to me from the early Pi and Arduino days.

You can look at AtomVM for a way to run Erlang and Elixir on an MCU. It just isn't Nerves. Nerves is a Linux :)

There is the AtomVM, a (mini)BEAM for microcontrollers https://www.atomvm.net/ There is also integration for Elixir and AtomVM.

Atom even compiles into wasm or at least should.

I'm curious if AtomVM is compatible with Erlang nodes.

Could you have a Pi on Nerves talking to microcontrollers?

I've never really worked with hardware but this all looks fascinating.

https://www.grisp.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com