BEAM

Definitions

1. The virtual machine at the heart of the Erlang/OTP ecosystem (also running Elixir and other languages), designed for massively concurrent, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time systems with preemptive scheduling of lightweight processes.

   In plain English: The engine that runs Erlang and Elixir programs, famous for handling millions of tiny tasks at once without crashing.

   Example: "The BEAM can run millions of processes per node with per-process GC, which is why WhatsApp scaled to 2 million connections per server."

Related Terms

• Elixir
• Actor
• Async
• Async/Await
• asyncio
• Behavior
• Channel
• GenServer
• Goroutine
• Immutability
• Isolate
• JVM
• Reference Capability
• Supervisor
• Runtime
• Serial Queue
• Supervisor Tree
• Worker Thread
• Yield
• Atomic Reference