Davide Bettio

AtomVM is a tiny portable virtual machine that allows BEAM code to run on microcontrollers with less than 500KB of RAM such as ESP32, STM32 or RPI 2040 devices. In few words you can flash AtomVM on a microcontroller such as the ESP32 and get any virtually unmodified code compiled for the BEAM running on it.

This talk will present AtomVM, a tiny portable virtual machine that allows Elixir and Erlang code to run on microcontrollers with less than 500KB of RAM such as the ESP32 or several STM32.

Erlang and Elixir are really good at handling network packets, running concurrent processes, dealing with faults, writing testable software and enabling rapid development. All this features are relevant for any language or framework that aims to IoT devices, therefore Erlang and Elixir might be good choice for IoT devices. However the BEAM, which is the standard Erlang and Elixir VM, cannot fit on those devices. AtomVM aims to overcome this limitation, by implementing a tiny virtual machine from scratch.

This talk aims to present AtomVM and to show how a functional language such as Elixir might boost development of IoT projects.