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by cess11 697 days ago
They run on the BEAM, and there are related IoT-platforms like Nerves. If find that to be a much nicer runtime than (C)Python.

Edit: I don't know where else to begin. It's a runtime that has lightweight processes, excellent observability, absurdly good fault tolerance, really nice programming languages and so on. It's designed for distributed computing.
1 comments
alexandercheema 697 days ago
Fascinating, will check this out! I wanted to focus on Python first to build this quickly, test out ideas and iterate.

This seems like a good option for a switch.

Do you know if any of these can run on Apple/Android devices?

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cess11 697 days ago
I avoid touching Apple devices but anything that can expose a Linux shell can run the BEAM. There are two main projects for small devices, https://nerves-project.org/ for more ordinary SoC-computers and https://www.atomvm.net/ for stuff like ESP32-chips.

On Android you've got Termux in F-Droid and can pull in whatever BEAM-setup you want. That's how I first started dabbling with the BEAM, I was using a tablet for most of my recreational programming and happened to try it out and got hooked.

Erlang is pretty weird, but it just clicks for some people so it's worth spending some time checking it out. Elixir is a really nice Python-/Ruby-like on the BEAM, but with pattern matching, real macros and all the absurdly powerful stuff in the Open Telecom Platform.

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