This is a project formerly known as Lumen, which myself and the other core devs presented on at ElixirConf a few years ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U</a><p>A lot has changed since then.<p>The name change came about because we found too many projects named "Lumen" also were launched around the same time or shortly thereafter.<p>Originally I envisioned a path towards creating a new WASM framework to build web applications using Elixir. Since then LiveView has come out and has made this less of a concern for us. While WASM compilation will be possible and we hope to backfill the runtime needs for web development the real focus and interest in this project for me is...<p>WASI compilation. With Firefly we will be able build self-contained binaries that will have all (many) of the benefits building applications with the BEAM and distributed systems. If WASI can run on something you should be able to compile your Elixir applications with Firefly and target your desired chipset.<p>We recently reached a milestone that we are hoping to release a blog post about it in the near future.
For those who don't know (I didn't) – BEAM is the Erlang virtual machine.<p>It supports many programming languages.<p>This new compiler/runtime targets WebAssembly.
Forget WASI, I'm interested in this project as a way to efficiently run Elixir on microcontrollers. It's a great model for embedded programming (not surprising given that was what it was designed).
Adobe also released a project called "Firefly". Not sure if this will be searchable after that.<p><a href="https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html</a>
While I appreciate this is cool project, and I enjoy writing Erlang & Elixir. What benefit is there to being able to run BEAM/OTP in the browser?