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by dozzie 3615 days ago
According to Wikipedia, work on BEAM started in 1992. Still earlier than Java.

LFE appeared in 2008, so it's newer than Scala.
2 comments
eggy 3615 days ago
Erlang was released into the 'wild' in 1988, but it had a Prolog-based VM, or JAM, Joe's Abstract Machine before the BEAM.[0]

The BEAM VM was being worked on in 1992 a year after work on Java in 1991.

[0] http://erlang.org/faq/implementations.html

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dozzie 3613 days ago
> The BEAM VM was being worked on in 1992 a year after work on Java in 1991.

You're right. What I meant by "still earlier than Java" is "still earlier than first public Java version", so there was no possibility to borrow anything.

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strmpnk 3615 days ago
BEAM was just one of a series of virtual machines that implement the Erlang language, so it's not really fair to compare it to Java (just as HotSpot was built a few years after Java).
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