[rdtsc]

> I'd /love/ to see a native Erlang system, soup to nuts.

I see where you are coming from but I don't see how assembly and a layer of C drivers is going to disappear. That is the whole idea behind having layers of abstraction. It is what makes one plug in a mouse and it works and then another mouse made by another company and it also works. There is a lot of firmware, assembly, kernel driver, kernel syscalls taking place but it support you moving your hand and a pointer moves on the screen correspondingly. We take that for granted but it is built on an existing infrastructure. It took years and it wasn't always the same. I remember older DOS days having to fish for mouse drivers.

Same with Erlang. Erlang itself is built with C. Beam VM is mostly C (maybe with some assembly). It runs on standard hardware with a few standard operating systems.

Now if we dream of the future. I can see architectures perhaps that do something like you suggest. There is one for instance: Erlang on Xen. The idea is that Erlang runs on a very small hardware footprint, without an OS (since Erlang's standard library pretty much provides large number of OS like features). Now they picked Xen and you can say perhaps "ha that's cheating, there is also Dom0 running!". But it isn't practical otherwise. Maybe they could have picked a particular motherboard and CPU combination but now it is hard to reproduce that, test it and lots thing have to be rewritten.

Take a look anyway, I think you'll be surprised:

http://erlangonxen.org/