[HN Gopher] Erlang ARM32 JIT is born
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       Erlang ARM32 JIT is born
        
       Author : plainOldText
       Score  : 141 points
       Date   : 2025-10-07 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.grisp.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.grisp.org)
        
       | IsTom wrote:
       | I don't have any experience with ARM, but from what I've seen
       | people write, isn't 32-bit ARM discontinued after v7?
        
         | whizzter wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | Take a look at their products. Seems like they run bare metal
           | Erlang on embedded devices.
        
         | ferriswil wrote:
         | 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-...
        
         | masklinn wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | crote wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | diegoperini wrote:
           | > 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.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | > 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.)
        
         | bobmcnamara wrote:
         | 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).
        
         | 15155 wrote:
         | Cortex-M chips will still be made for decades.
        
       | alexisread wrote:
       | Gah, misread that as esp32 JIT, which would be eye opening!
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | esp32 is now also RISC-V so I guess it wouldn't be completely
         | out of the question. But I guess you meant this flavor
         | 
         | https://www.cadence.com/content/dam/cadence-www/global/en_US...
        
           | alexisread wrote:
           | Either TBH, I imagined the main issue would be ram, even with
           | psram. EQMX is used a lot for IOT and it'd be interesting
           | seeing more heavy loads on the edge.
        
       | davidw wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | felixgallo wrote:
         | For a certain definitions of faster
        
         | 5- wrote:
         | _and_ 32-bit arm (nothing wrong with it; just like tcl and
         | erlang, it 's alive and well)
        
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