This blog post is a brief history lesson about the Erlang compiler for the BEAM machine. To provide some context, there will first be a quick look at the abstract machines for Erlang.

A brief overview of the early Erlang implementations

The Prolog interpreter

The first version of Erlang was implemented in Prolog in 1986. That version of Erlang was used to find out which features of the languages were useful and which were not. New languages features could be added or deleted in a matter of hours or days.

JAM (Joe’s Abstract Machine)

It soon became clear that Erlang needed to be at least 40 times faster to be useful in real projects.

In 1989 JAM (Joe’s Abstract Machine) was first implemented. Mike Williams wrote the runtime system in C, Joe Armstrong wrote the compiler, and Robert Virding wrote the libraries.

JAM turned out be 70 times faster than the Prolog interpreter. Success?

TEAM (Turbo Erlang Abstract Machine)

It soon became clear that Erlang still needed to be faster to be useful in real projects.

Therefore Bogumil (“Bogdan”) Hausman created TEAM (Turbo Erlang Abstract Machine). It compiled the Erlang code to C code, which was then compiled to native code using GCC.

It was significantly faster than JAM for small projects. Unfortunately, compilation was very slow, and the code size of the compiled code was too big to make it useful for large projects.

BEAM (Bogdan’s Erlang Abstract Machine)

Bogumil Hausman next machine was called BEAM (Bogdan’s Erlang Abstract Machine). It was a hybrid machine that could execute both native code and threaded code with an interpreter. That allowed customers to compile their time-critial modules to native code and all other modules to threaded BEAM code. The threaded BEAM in itself was faster than JAM code.

Bogdan’s original compiler for BEAM shared the compiler front end with JAM. Essentially, the front end at that time did the same thing as the front end in the current compiler as described in Lost in Translation (Exploring the Compiler’s Front End).

I don’t have the source code for Bodgan’s original compiler, but as far as I can determine it had three compiler passes that translated the abstract format to threaded BEAM code.

beam_compile - Translated the abstract format to BEAM instructions.

beam_optimize - Optimized the BEAM instructions. This pass was mandatory, since it did some necessary transformations of the BEAM instructions.

beam_asm - Converted the symbolic BEAM assembly format to a binary BEAM module.

VEE (Virding’s Erlang Engine)

Here we must mention VEE (Virding’s Erlang Engine) for reasons that will soon become clear.

VEE was an experimental implementation with a different memory model compared to JAM and BEAM. Instead of JAM’s and BEAM’s separate heaps for each process, VEE used a single shared heap with a real-time garbage collector. That made message passing blindlingly fast compared to JAM and BEAM.

Overall, though, there was no speed gain compared to JAM. The reason was probably that the single shared heap decreased the cache hit rate.

The maturation of BEAM

The OTP group and Erlang/OTP was created to industrialize Erlang and make it suitable for huge real-world projects. The first release, OTP R1B, was released in 1996.

This is the point where the history lesson may become a little bit more subjective.

I joined the Erlang/OTP team at the end of 1996. My first small code contributions to Erlang/OTP were included in OTP R1D.

I worked in the ERTS (Erlang Run-Time System) team, which at that time was lead by Kenneth Lundin. Initially I worked with the Erlang runtime system for Microsoft Windows. After some time (maybe a year or so), Kenneth asked me to help stabilizing and improving BEAM. Gradually BEAM become my main responsibility, and when Bogdan left Ericsson, I become the main developer responsible for the BEAM interpreter and compiler.

This blog post desperately tries to cover the history of the BEAM compiler, but I think that some more historical context is needed before we can approach the compiler.

The overall goal of the work on BEAM from OTP R1 up to OTP R5 was to make it stable enough and fast enough to be useful in real projects.

There were two major obstacles to reaching that goal:

BEAM/C, that is, native code via C code.

The huge number of ever-changing BEAM instructions.

BEAM/C must die!

It soon became obvious that BEAM/C, the compiler passes that compiled Erlang code to C code, had to die. At the time that I started working on BEAM, there were three distinct flavors of BEAM/C: one for GCC on Sparc, one for GCC on non-sparc CPUs (such as Intel x86), and one for other C compilers that did not support GCC’s extension for taking the address of a label. Bugs not only showed up in the native code, but the mere existence of BEAM/C complicated and caused bugs in the threaded BEAM interpreter.

Unfortunately, early in my career of improving BEAM, I made some optimizations of the size of the C code generated by BEAM/C. That came back to bite me later when I suggested that we should remove BEAM/C. The size improvements made it possible to fit more Erlang code compiled to native code into the system, and the native code was faster than threaded BEAM code. Our customer at the time (the AXD 301 project) needed the extra speed improvements that BEAM/C gave them and did not allow us to remove BEAM/C unless we could improve the performance of threaded BEAM code to similar or better than BEAM/C performance.

The ever-changing BEAM instructions

At that time, the BEAM interpreter had over 300 instructions. While JAM had a very simple loader that essentially only loaded the JAM files into memory, the loader for BEAM had to translate every instruction from the byte format in the BEAM files to the threaded code format in memory. The BEAM had hand-written code for the loading of every single instruction.

To make it worse, the instruction set was constantly evolving. Bug fixes and performance improvements needed new instructions, and those instructions had to be implemented in the compiler, threaded code interpreter (the process_main() function in beam_emu.c ), and the loader. In every minor and major release of Erlang/OTP, the users of BEAM had to recompile all of their Erlang code because the instruction set had changed.

There must be a better way, I thought. I started to write a simple Perl script to a least automate the mapping from instruction name to instruction number in the compiler, interpreter, and loader. Tony Rogvall suggested that I could be more ambitious and generate most of the code for for the loader using the Perl script. He also suggested that operands for many instructions could be packed into a single word. That would reduce load code size and also improve the cache hit rate, improving execution speed.

So I started writing the first version of the beam_makeops script and rewriting the loader. I prefer to work incrementally, making minor changes to a code base that is always working. But I could not rewrite the loader incrementally, so I hacked away frantically for two or three days until I had a bare bones version of the new loader working. I could then relax a little and somewhat more slowly add more features to beam_makeops and the loader.

The new loader took over some tasks formerly done by the compiler.

For example, the BEAM machine has several specialized move instructions. There is one instruction for moving something into an X register, another for moving an atom into an X register, and so on. Before the new loader, the compiler knew about all those variants of move instructions and selected the appropriate one. With the new loader, there is only one move instruction that the compiler needs to care about, and the loader will select the appropriate specialized move instruction to use at load time.

Another minor optimization done by the compiler was combining of common instructions sequences. For example, a move instruction followed by a call instruction would be combined to a move_call instruction. That optimization was also moved to the loader.

All those capabilities made it possible to significantly simplify and reduce the number of instructions known to the compiler. More importantly, that made it possible to keep the instruction set stable (while still allowing minor optimizations and performance tuning by tweaking only the loader and interpreter), avoiding the need to recompile all Erlang code every time there was a new release.

If my memory doesn’t fail me, the new loader was introduced in OTP R4.

OTP R5B: The “new” BEAM

Moving forward to OTP R5.

OTP R5 was the last release that supported JAM.

OTP R5 can also be said to be first release that featured the “new” BEAM. In that release, the modern BEAM file format was introduced. The same file format is used today. At that time, there were 78 BEAM instructions; in OTP 20, there are 159 instructions (actually, 129 active instructions and 30 obsoleted instructions no longer used). While new instructions have been introduced when needed and obsolete instructions have been removed, it has always been possible to load BEAM files compiled from at least two major releases back.

Execution of threaded BEAM had become fast enough, so that BEAM/C could be dropped (already in R4, I think). But strangely enough, the customers still wanted more speed.

The BEAM compiler in R5 was still Bogdan’s original compiler. While it did more optimizations than the JAM ever did, we knew that more optimizations were possible.

R6B: Enter Kernel Erlang

Meanwhile, on the top floor Robert Virding was busy writing a new compiler for his VEE machine. In that new compiler, Robert introduced a new intermediate format that he called Kernel Erlang. The idea was that more optimizations could be applied to the code in that format before generating code for the actual machine.

At that time, there was no actual interpreter that could execute the code emitted by his new compiler (he had not updated the VEE machine yet). The machine he had in mind was a register machine. It was similar to BEAM, except that it did stack trimming.

We wanted the better performance that we could get from Robert’s compiler, but the question was: should we implement a new interpreter (or adapt BEAM) to execute the code from Robert’s compiler, or should we adapt Robert’s compiler to generate BEAM code?

Because we now for the first time had a stable implementation of BEAM, we decided not to rock the boat again; thus, we decided that I should adapt the code generator part of Robert’s compiler for BEAM.

For the most part, I used Robert’s name for instructions. For example, the instruction to load a term into a register was called M in the original BEAM, while Robert’s compiler used the move . The more major changes was in the handling of the stack. Robert’s compiler had stack trimming, which I had to remove and rewrite to handle BEAM’s fixed stack frame. (I reintroduced a limited form of stack trimming later.)

Since JAM was not supported in OTP R6, all customers that had previously used JAM had to migrate to BEAM. To minimize the risk of the migration as much as possible, one of our customers requested that we made the battle-tested original BEAM compiler available as an option in OTP R6.

Therefore, we added options to choose which version of the compiler to use. To use the old compiler, one would write:

$ erlc +v1 some_module.erl

Default was Robert’s new compiler, which was called v2 . There was also an undocumented, unofficial compiler version called v3 .

All compilers shared the front end and the beam_asm pass that created the final BEAM module.

The v1_compiler

The v1 compiler had the following passes:

v1_adapt

v1_compile

v1_optimize

v1_cleanup

The v1_compile and v1_optimize passes were essentially the beam_compile and beam_optimize passes from Bogdan’s compiler.

There had been some changes to the front end since R5, so the v1_adapt pass was there to hide those changes for the v1_compile and v1_optimize passes. The v1_cleanup pass was an additional minor optimization pass; I think it was present in OTP R5 as well.

The v2_compiler

The v2 compiler was Robert’s new compiler. It had the following passes:

v2_kernel

v2_kernopt

v2_match

v2_life

v2_codegen

The v2_kernel pass translated the abstract format to Kernel Erlang.

v2_kernopt did very basic optimizations of the Kernel Erlang code, essentially only constant propagation and constant folding.

v2_match did pattern matching compilation. JAM would match clauses in function heads or case expressions sequentially. The old BEAM compiler would do only a little bit better in that it could match multiple integers or atoms in a single instruction. Robert’s compiler was the first Erlang compiler to properly compile pattern matching using the algorithm described in The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones.

v2_life would calculate life-time information needed by the v2_codegen pass, and v2_codegen would generate the BEAM assembly code.

R7B: Enter Core Erlang

Meanwhile, Richard Carlsson and the HiPE group at Uppsala University come up with the idea for a new intermediate format useful as an interchange format for different Erlang implementations and for optimizing Erlang programs.

The new format was called Core Erlang. Robert liked the idea and started to implement Core Erlang in the compiler. The undocumented implementation of v3 compiler in OTP R6 is based on a draft version of the Core Erlang specification.

In OTP R7B, the v1 and v2 compilers were removed, and the only remaining compiler was the v3 compiler that used Core Erlang. It had the following passes:

v3_core

v3_core_opt

v3_kernel

v3_life

v3_codegen

The v3_core pass translated the abstract format to Core Erlang.

The v3_core_opt pass essentially only called sys_core_fold , which did constant propagation and constant folding. sys_core_fold still do those things, and more.

The remaining passes do the same thing as today.

The v3_kernel pass translates from Core Erlang to Kernel Erlang, and also does pattern matching compilation (in the same way as in v2_match ). The optimizations in v2_kernopt are now done in sys_core_fold .

The v3_life pass (despite its name) no longer calculates life-time information. The life-time information is instead calculated by v3_kernel and passed on as annotations.

The reason that v3_life still exists is that Robert had continued to work on his own version of codegen that did not have all my changes in it to work for BEAM. While implementing the Core Erlang passes, he also did many improvements to codegen .

When it was time to integrate our different versions of the compiler, Robert looked in horror at all my changes in codegen . To avoid having to reintroduce all my adapations and optimizations for BEAM into his new version of codegen , Robert wrote an adapter pass that translated from the new Kernel Erlang format to the old format so that my codegen would work. The adapter pass is called v3_life .

Thus, v3_codegen is essentially v2_codegen with a new name.

In the upcoming OTP 21, v3_life has been combined with v3_codegen .

Learning Erlang from Robert

In the time period that Robert and I worked together on the compiler, I usually worked on v3_codegen and the passes below, while Robert worked on all passes above v3_codegen .

Occasionally, I would add some optimizations to sys_core_fold and give them to Robert to incorporate into his latest version of sys_core_fold .

I would then look at what Robert had done with my code, and learn.