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A Little Actor Machine that runs on Native and WebAssembly

What is LAM?

LAM is a research project exploring a lightweight alternative to the BEAM that runs as Native and WebAssembly binaries, both on WASI-enabled systems and browsers.

It will supports:

• Immutable functional programming with proper tail calls
• Concurrency via processes and message passing
• Multi-core scheduling (except on the Web)
• Erlang/OTP architectural patterns (such as supervision trees)

It will not support hot-code reloading or distribution, and so not all BEAM programs will be supported.

It will be useful for building:

• short-lived, fast-startup services (e.g AWS Lambdas / Google Cloud Functions)
• web apps
• fast command line tools
• native GUI applications

Great! Can I use it now?

Not yet! There's plenty of work to be done for it to be fully usable, but we keep a few tracking issues here so its easier for you to see the progress:

• BEAM Compatibility Status
• LAM Specification Status
• Erlang BIF Support across Runtimes

Getting Started

You can download the latest binary from the releases page. After unpacking it you should be able to add it to your PATH env and start playing around with the lam binary.

Like this:

# in this example I'm running linux with glibc
$ wget https://github.com/AbstractMachinesLab/lam/releases/download/v0.0.5/lam-v0.0.5-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
$ tar xzf lam-*
$ export PATH=$(pwd)/lam/bin:$PATH

Now we can do a quick test. Make a file test.erl with this contents:

-module(test).

-export([main/1]).

main([]) -> ok;
main([Name|T]) ->
  io:format(<<"Hello, ~p!\n">>, [Name]),
  main(T).

And we can compile it to BEAM byte code and use LAM to build a binary for it, like this:

$ erlc test.erl
$ lam build test.beam --output test.exe --target native --entrypoint test
$ ./test.exe Joe Robert Mike
Hello, Joe!
Hello, Robert!
Hello, Mike!

How does it work?

LAM compiles your .beam files ahead of time into a representation that's optimized for running them.

Then it bundles that with the appropriate target runtime into some binary output.

                       binary
                    instructions
                   +------------+              output
 .beam files +---->| 1001101110 |-----+    +-----------+
                   +------------+     |    | .exe      |
                                      |--->| .wasm     |
                   +-------------+    |    | .wasm/.js |
                   | LAM RunTime |----+    +-----------+
                   +-------------+