The Erlang virtual machine was built for telecom switches: millions of
concurrent connections, hot code reloading, fault tolerance. Forty years
later, it's the best runtime for a surprising range of problems.
What happens when you throw 128 cores at the BEAM.
Bringing OTP supervision trees to embedded systems.
The actor model applied to LLM orchestration.
1. Lightweight processes -- millions of them, each with its own heap
2. Supervision trees -- crash recovery is a first-class concept
3. Hot code reloading -- deploy without downtime
4. Pattern matching -- elegant protocol handling
5. Distribution -- built-in clustering across nodes
The actor model in BEAM maps directly to multi-agent AI systems.
Each agent is a GenServer. The supervisor restarts crashed agents.
Message passing between agents is just `send/2`.
as the runtime for agent systems