This is post #2 from the series of short posts on the foundation of Elixir. In my first post, I described the Erlang Virtual Machine (aka the BEAM) in more detail. Today, I am going to provide a quick breakdown of the various elements that make up the fascinating world of Elixir, Erlang, Erlang/OTP, and the BEAM in a way that's easy to understand.
Elixir: A functional programming language built on top of the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). It was designed to be a more approachable and modern alternative to Erlang while still leveraging all of Erlang's strengths of which there are many. Elixir provides a clean and expressive syntax similar to Ruby that makes it easier to write expressive code.
Erlang: A programming language developed by Ericsson in the 1980s for building highly reliable and fault-tolerant telecommunications systems. It has been battle-tested and is known for its lightweight processes (actors), message-passing concurrency model, and built-in support for fault tolerance. Erlang's design principles focus on scalability, reliability, and soft real-time performance.
Erlang/OTP: OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a set of libraries, tools, and design principles that extend Erlang's capabilities for building robust and scalable systems. OTP provides standard behaviors, supervision trees, and other abstractions that help developers write fault-tolerant and maintainable code. While technically separate from Erlang, OTP is always shipped as a unit with the Erlang runtime.
BEAM: The BEAM (Bogdan/Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine) is the virtual machine that executes Erlang and Elixir code. It is optimized for running concurrent and distributed applications, providing features such as lightweight processes, preemptive scheduling, and garbage collection tailored for soft real-time systems. The BEAM is responsible for managing processes, handling message passing, and ensuring fault tolerance in Erlang and Elixir applications.
Elixir is a Ruby-like user-friendly language that leverages the power of Erlang and OTP to build scalable and fault-tolerant systems. Both Elixir and Erlang run on the BEAM virtual machine, which provides the necessary infrastructure for executing concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications. It is the combination of Elixir, Erlang, OTP, and the BEAM that creates a robust ecosystem enabling developers to build reliable and high-performance software solutions.