A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.

Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)

Hi Jose

You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.

I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup

Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.