How could BEAM VM benefit a desktop app?

this seems to not have been mentioned but Wings3D is a desktop app written mostly in Erlang. See a post from 2009.

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Yeah, I think a ton of apps would benefit from the BEAM resilience. You never want your whole Desktop app crash just because a ui toggle has a slight bug or such. That said the initial packaging needed for deployment is a hassle still. But in my opinion LiveView is really great for Desktop applications. With the guaranteed 0 latency on a desktop it’s even better than in the web.

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It sounds like you are asking for a clear separation between your model and your view and handle the case where your view has a bug.

If your view layer is purely a visualization of your model (and it rarely is), then this should be rather easy. The question is though whether your application would be usable with your bug, because it is likely to crash over and over again.

You might now want to have a separate process for every component, but I would suspect that this becomes quickly a performance issue. Not because of the number of processes, but because you have to walk your tree to render it. Doable? sure. Performant? For a small, simple UI for sure, but for something more complex? More questionable (especially if you have other processes that might access your component processes in the meantime for example to handle UI clicks)

But happy to be proven wrong