[calvinmorrison]

Usage

It is not immediately clear what the intended usage pattern for Lumen and WebAssembly is.

Pros and Cons

Things we like:

    The idea of having both runtime and code compile is cool

Things we’re not big fans of:

    We could not immediately figure out exactly how Lumen works, and builds appear to be failing
    The project might be stalled or unmaintained. It has not been updated in over a year.

[nakamoto_damacy]

WebAssembly’s goal is to be a “portable execution layer” — an OS abstraction. If WASM becomes the standard runtime across browsers, servers, and edge networks, something still has to orchestrate thousands of concurrent tasks, message queues, supervisors, restarts, etc.

Erlang/OTP already solves that — beautifully.

So, the motivation is:

“What if BEAM’s concurrency runtime could itself be compiled to WebAssembly — and become the actor system of the WebAssembly world?”

That’s why projects like Firefly and Lumen are interesting: they’re exploring whether Erlang’s runtime model can become part of the WASM ecosystem — just like how Go and Rust shaped the serverless world.