leifericf
Warning: Half-baked shower-thought follows. High probability of ridiculousness.
Suppose you wanted to write an operating system on top of the BEAM in Elixir. How would you design it and what do you think would be the biggest challenges?
What kind of unique features could it enable?
Let’s call it BeamOS.
I imagine each application within the operating system running as supervised processes, with some unique possibilities of running across several machines in a cluster. Perhaps even some kind of peer-to-peer-ish networking features, where one could share one’s hardware with friends and family.
Maybe I could run my word processor on your hardware.
I also imagine the possibilities for distributing applications through some kind of built-in app store/package manager thingy. Sort of like APT or Homebrew, but OS-native.
I suppose one of the biggest challenges of implementing an operating system in a language with immutable data would be running out of memory due to copying of data. Drivers, compute-heavy operations and GUI code would also need to be implemented as NIFs in C, I guess.
This is probably a silly idea, but I think it’s fun to think about.
Feel free to contribute to my fantasy, if you find it entertaining 
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sneako
Definitely a fun idea and you aren’t the first to think of it. Check out these slides on the HydrOS project: http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1498583896660864samwilliamshowtobuildanoswitherlang_awhistlestoptourofhydros.pdf
Here is their official site, that i’ve visited before, but appears to be down right now
http://hydros-project.org/
leifericf
That’s really cool, @sneako —Thanks for sharing those links!
rvirding
One limitation is that in an Erlang/Elixir node you can only have one version of module. This makes it difficult to run multiple applications if they happen to both use the same name for different modules. The confusion would be truly wonderful.
When we were designing Erlang and the basic ideas of how to use the language features we were thinking more along the lines of operating systems rather than of applications. I tend to think of it not so much as a language with concurrency but more of an operating system with a languages.
Have a peak at the GRiSP.
leifericf
Thank you for your input, @rvirding! It’s very interesting to hear some thoughts and point of view about this topic from one of the originators and designers of Erlang.
That looks interesting!
I think it makes sense to use Erlang and the BEAM for embedded, where you’d want to distribute new versions of your code to a large number of devices without inconvenient downtime. Devices could get notified of new software versions and pull updates at convenient times, etc.
It’s one of the areas where hot code swapping might be a good solution.
I haven’t done any embedded programming yet and I’m looking forward to checking out Nerves at some point. Now that I know about GRiSP, I’ll check that out as well.
jasonmjohnson
I really wish there was a BeEmacs.
leifericf
It’s worth creating if only for that awesome name
leifericf
@rvirding - Is it OK with you if I snag that as a quite for a presentation I’m putting together?
bottlenecked
Not quite the same but it made me remember the Midori, Microsoft’s take on how a message passing OS could look like
rvirding
No worries, go ahead.
leifericf
Awesome, thanks!