Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

Into Erlang/Elixir

In this last section of the chapter, we'll investigate embedding Rust into the BEAM, the virtual machine that underpins Erlang and Elixir. The BEAM is a sophisticated work-stealing scheduler system that happens to be programmable. Erlang processes are small C structs that bounce around between scheduler threads and carry enough internal information to allow interpretation for a fixed number of instructions. There's no concept of shared memory in Erlang/Elixir: communication between different concurrent actors in the system must happen via message passing. There are many benefits to this and the VM does a great deal of work to avoid copying when possible. Erlang/Elixir processes receive messages into a message queue, a double-ended ...