archSeer
Enigma - A simple implementation of the Erlang VM in Rust
Hi! I’m usually a lurker, but I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on for a while. About a month ago, I started working on an Erlang VM in Rust. My goal was to learn more about OTP internals so I’d be able to work on some contributions to BEAM. It’s been a ton of fun, and I’ve quickly progressed to implementing most of the opcodes (but not all of the native functions) – I’m currently working on getting the application bootstrap to run (:init.start).
It’s an interesting look into how BEAM might look like if it was built from scratch today. I’m also planning to experiment with a few different ideas (alternative GC implementations, cross compiling to WebAssembly, different ETS backends, map structures, etc.), as well as writing a bit more information on how BEAM works internally (The BEAM Book is a wonderful resource, but incomplete in some parts).
Because of the scale of work, I’m looking for more contributors! If all this sounds exciting, or you’d like to learn more about OTP or low-level programming, please reach out 
Also, a shoutout to @bettio ! I’ve seen the AtomVM announcement around the time I started working on Enigma, hopefully we can share notes on a few things
Link to repository: GitHub - archseer/enigma: An Erlang VM implementation in Rust · GitHub
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archSeer
Quick update: I’m making progress, currently about 30k instructions into the OTP boot-up. There’s binary and map support, process links and monitors, some limited file I/O, and I’m currently working on a minimal ETS implementation. It doesn’t work just out of the box yet, but I’ll have some preview builds soon I hope
I’ve also set up a channel on the Elixir Slack, #enigma for anyone interested.
OvermindDL1
I wonder if this is worth posting at Redirecting to Google Groups or if not now perhaps when a bit more developed as it would gain a lot more visibility especially from core devs who might find this interesting.
hauleth
For supporting “GC-ish” functionality you can use per-proces arena. As Erlang always copy data between processes and most of the processes are short-lived then you do not need highly sophisticated algorithms and just free whole arena at once when process dies.
Project seems very interesting and when I will have some time I will try to contribute to it.
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