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To add to all these other answers, what would you hope to get out of it without BEAM? Just the syntax?

I like Python, but it's dynamically typed and slow-ish. I like Scala, but I've bumped into the pointy edges of the JVM (e.g.: type erasure) too many times. Rust is great but for most use-cases I am happy compromising with a GC than having to worry about liftimes and ownership and borrows, etc..

Gleam seems like a happy in-between for me, but not knowing much about BEAM and with my negative experiences with the JVM, I had concerns about the overhead.

I don't really have any experience with the JVM other than playing with Clojure. I don't have much to add to the other answers. Two things of note:

- BEAM trades slow CPU in favour of fast IO, so it's not great for number crunching. - While it can be great for CLI utilities, the VM (although very lightweight) does have a noticeable startup time. It's under a second but it's not a good fit for something you would want to run often, ie, if you were building something like git.

As mentioned in other comments, its super power is its concurrency model. I've essentially forgotten what a mutex or semaphore or whatthaveyou is :)

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