Erlang ARM32 JIT is born

(grisp.org)

170 points | by plainOldText 5 days ago ago

19 comments

  • davidw 5 days ago ago

    A Tcl article and an Erlang article - good morning!

    I miss working with Erlang especially, but it's also certainly kind of a niche thing. Other languages are faster and have more effort being put into them.

    • 5- 5 days ago ago

      and 32-bit arm (nothing wrong with it; just like tcl and erlang, it's alive and well)

    • felixgallo 5 days ago ago

      For a certain definitions of faster

    • bmitc 5 days ago ago

      Don't Erlang and Elixir have a lot of effort being put into them?

  • IsTom 5 days ago ago

    I don't have any experience with ARM, but from what I've seen people write, isn't 32-bit ARM discontinued after v7?

    • ferriswil 5 days ago ago

      Their motivation is explained in the first post of the series[1]

      [1] https://www.grisp.org/blog/posts/2025-06-23-jit-arm32.1#why-...

      • snvzz 5 days ago ago

        For their real motivation[0], click on hardware at the top of the page.

        Their existing hardware is aarch32. It really is that simple.

        0. https://www.grisp.org/hardware

      • bvttf 4 days ago ago

        loved them complaining about having "only" 16 registers

    • crote 5 days ago ago

      There's still a huge embedded market!

      Plenty of microcontrollers have a single-digit number of Cortex-M cores and memory/flash counted in the megabytes. It'll be decades until that market reaches the multi-gigabyte point, so why bother wasting a whole bunch of memory on 64-bit pointers?

      I'm not quite sure why you'd want to run Erlang on it, but the hardware exists.

      • derefr 5 days ago ago

        > I'm not quite sure why you'd want to run Erlang on it, but the hardware exists.

        https://nerves-project.org/#features has a decent pitch for why. (Most of the features listed here aren't features of Nerves-the-Elixir-IoT-runtime-codebase per se, but rather benefits of Nerves-the-toolchain enabling you to easily build lean, embedded Erlang [on Linux] firmware images.)

      • diegoperini 5 days ago ago

        > I'm not quite sure why you'd want to run Erlang on it, but the hardware exists.

        Erlang is invented before IoT was a thing to facilitate distributed computing for telecommunication in a highly reliable manner. It makes perfect sense to adapt it for driving fleets of cheap IoT devices.

    • bobmcnamara 5 days ago ago

      No, it's a supported ISA on most v8-a and I believe all v8-m implementations.

      It's the only ISA on Cortex-A32, but not sure if any mainstream chips were ever produced with that core.

      (Depending on course if you want to get specific about Arm/Thumb/Thumb2, I lumped them all together above).

    • masklinn 5 days ago ago

      That does not mean ARM32 implementations and uses are stopping any time soon. Afaik arm hasn’t even obsoleted armv6, although Linux distributions are starting to drop it.

    • whizzter 5 days ago ago

      Doesn't mean that machines won't be built with other chips for a considerable time.

      That said, if you're putting something like Erlang on a chip, aren't one likely to want the extra memory (and performance) of a slightly newer SoC.

      • LtdJorge 5 days ago ago

        Take a look at their products. Seems like they run bare metal Erlang on embedded devices.

    • 15155 5 days ago ago

      Cortex-M chips will still be made for decades.

  • alexisread 5 days ago ago

    Gah, misread that as esp32 JIT, which would be eye opening!