upvote
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 :-)

reply
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).

reply
Thanks for the kind words and the nice question!

1. The cross module optimizations I mentioned above 2. Have a WASM target for the runtime itself 3. Make it easier to ship single file executables with the whole VM

But they are really “nice-to-have”s. I have been a happy user for 15+ years!

reply