{"podcast":{"title":"BEAM There, Done That","slug":"beam-there-done-that-7725251","podcast_index_feed_id":7725251,"rss_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/10f787368/podcast/rss","website_url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/beamtheredonethat","image_url":"https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/45445194/45445194-1772070691483-c305179ad8028.jpg","author":"Plangora","episode_count":22,"summary":"BEAM There, Done That is a podcast about building real systems with Elixir, Erlang, and the BEAM. We’ve built it before — distributed systems, fault‑tolerant services, event pipelines, real‑time apps, production nightmares, and the supervision trees that saved them. Each episode dives into practical lessons from shipping software on the BEAM: architecture decisions, scaling challenges, operational failures, and the patterns that actually work. No hype. No theory without scars. Just hard‑won experience from engineers who’ve been there.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-31T20:20:07.510585+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/beam-there-done-that-7725251"},"episode":{"title":"30 Years Inside the BEAM: Björn Gustafsson on Building Erlang's Runtime","slug":"30-years-inside-the-beam-bj-rn-gustafsson-on-building-erlang-s-runtime","published_at":"2026-06-26T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/beam-there-done-that-7725251/30-years-inside-the-beam-bj-rn-gustafsson-on-building-erlang-s-runtime","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/beam-there-done-that-7725251","url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/beamtheredonethat/episodes/30-Years-Inside-the-BEAM-Bjrn-Gustafsson-on-Building-Erlangs-Runtime-e3l40pg","audio_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/10f787368/podcast/play/121815280/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-5-22%2F426590411-44100-2-b06a8c0888f45.mp3","summary":"Three engineers. Three different virtual machines. One conversation that started with the JAM and ends with the JIT compiler. Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down again with Björn Gustafsson — member of the OTP team since 1996, and the person who has personally shepherded the BEAM through every major transition since taking it over from Bogdan Wódzicki — for a deep dive into 30 years of runtime engineering. Topics include: the three competing virtual machines built in parallel at Ericsson's lab — JAM, Robert Virding's V, and Bogdan's BEAM — and why each one's design choices succeeded or failed a compiler bug that caused random crashes and took weeks to find — and the BEAM Validator that was built specifically so it could never happen again why "turbo Erlang" compiled-to-C delivered a 10-20x sequential speedup on paper that shrank to 2x once concurrency entered the picture, and why that mattered for chip design the BEAM loader — Björn's own invention, still in use today — and why decoupling the compiler from hand-written runtime translation mattered how Björn took over Bogdan's code in 1997 and turned a research prototype into a 30-year production runtime without ever breaking backward compatibility what's coming next: the JIT compiler (next episode), type systems, and a possible episode on the historical and emerging Erlang machines -record(history, { jam, v, turbo_erlang, beam }). If you care about language runtimes, VM design, or how production systems survive three decades of evolution without ever stopping, this episode is for you. Recorded May 26, 2026.","meta_description":"Three engineers. Three different virtual machines. One conversation that started with the JAM and ends with the JIT compiler. Allen Wyma and Francesco Ces…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3195,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/beam-there-done-that-7725251/episodes/30-years-inside-the-beam-bj-rn-gustafsson-on-building-erlang-s-runtime/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/beam-there-done-that-7725251/30-years-inside-the-beam-bj-rn-gustafsson-on-building-erlang-s-runtime.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}