The people building on the BEAM, in their own words.
Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with the engineers shipping Elixir, Erlang and Gleam in production — what they built, what broke, and what they'd do differently.
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Hernán Rivas Acosta's first Erlang game server, a football game for Cartoon Network, reached 50,000 concurrent players on one machine. The BEAM didn't stop it there. The OS file descriptor limit did, and the team chose not to raise it. The Java option they had considered would have managed a few thousand.
In 2017, Davide Bettio created AtomVM to run Erlang, Elixir and Gleam code on embedded devices with just a few kilobytes of memory. Fast forward to today, and Giacomo Cavalieri of the Gleam core team has built tooling that flashes a Gleam project onto a board with a single command.
On Christmas Eve, the BEAM's scheduler throttled down to save power. A batch job arrived. A Christmas worth of XML took down all three failover nodes. The Klarna CEO called. Erik Stenman was already at his desk.
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