I mostly use Clojure these days, but I'm really happy that other languages have implementations on top of the JVM. The JVM is a mature beast with hundreds of man-years of effort put into its development. The more languages use it, the better.
This may not be the best place to ask about it, but I figure it's worth a shot. Anyone happen to have any documentation on the BEAM binary format ( I found <a href="http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html</a> but it's quite old) and the opcodes used in it?
see this post from a while ago too - "Erlang Doesn’t Fit The JVM": <a href="http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Erlang_Doesnt_Fit_The_JVM/" rel="nofollow">http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Erlang_Doesnt_...</a>
This looks really cool. It uses Kilim, the lightweight threading library for java, that I hadn't heard of before:<p><a href="http://github.com/kilim/kilim" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/kilim/kilim</a><p>I have been looking for something similar for C but have not been able to find anything.
I met Kresten at the Erlang Factory this year - he's an incredibly talented developer and gave a great talk on the project. My sense as a relative Erlang 'outsider' is that the Erlang folks were skeptical at first but warmed to him as the conference went on because it was clear that he was addressing a lot of the concerns that running on the JVM was impossible (tail recursion, message passing, etc)...
"Good question. Well, I just wanted to learn Erlang, and so this felt like a good way to get through all the details. Seems to be working — I am learning erlang!"<p>That's how the Mono project started :-)
Even if it did, bloody why? Why why why would you do this. I'm sorry but I'm no fan of Erlang syntax.<p>Wouldn't it be much better to port another language to the Erlang VM (like Ruby) than the other way around?