Dawid Danieluk (Nov 18 2024 at 17:41): Dawid Danieluk (Nov 18 2024 at 17:41):Hello, recently I've been reading on elixir and beam and I just got silly idea that I think shows how unique abstraction platforms are.
I've seen some people here asking if it would be possible to create BEAM platform for Roc and I've seen comments that it's possible (even if not probable due to amount of work). If such platform existed (let's say it's called 'backend-horizontal') you could create another platform with the same set of APIs built with Rust and some actor framework (let's call it 'backend-vertical').
This way when you start creating some app you could use 'verical' platform until that's feasable and when you want to start horizontal scaling you just swap hyperefficient 'vertical' platform for multiple nodes of 'horizontal' one.
This way you only pay for what you need, but option to have seamless horizontal scaling wouldn't require any deep refactors.
Language with swappable runtimes really brings a lot to the table :mind_blown:
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 18 2024 at 18:15):Yeah. Should be technically possible
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 18 2024 at 18:16):Though may be hard to have the exact same set of exposed apis (or mapper functions for everything exposed)
Dawid Danieluk (Nov 18 2024 at 18:24):Sure, it would probably be very hard to make sure that everything behaves exactly the same on both platforms, but it's more of a thought experiment anyway. It's not something that would come to fruition in many years anyway, because to have incentive to work on something like that you'd probably need one very well established platform for someone to spend time on creating leaner and more performant version of it (with slightly different characteristics like horizontal scaling in this example).
Still it's pretty cool that this is 'technically possible' at all :-)
Sky Rose (Nov 19 2024 at 02:06):I've been dreaming of a BEAM platform, too, and wondering whether it'd be harder to do a BEAM platform or to write a new actor framework from scratch that's just inspired by Erlang OTP. I'd never considered that you could do both!
Last updated: Jun 16 2026 at 16:19 UTC