Does Erlang work on any non-x86 processors?

Question

Does Erlang work on any non-x86 platforms?

Microcontrollers for instance? I think it'd be neat to get a bunch of these and put Erlang code on them.

Or does it work on GPUs? With Erlangs concurrent nature, it should be able to properly use a GPU. Or is CUDA pretty much it (at least for NVidia cards)?

Answer 1

If you look at http://www.erlang.org/doc.html you see that erlang runs on telecom switches which mostly use non-x86 processors.

Does this answer the question? On that site under faq are also instructions for a mailing list from where you probably get more specific answers.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Erlang is open source, so it could be pretty much ported to anything you'd care to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)

Answer 3

erlang runs on anything that has gcc built for it just about. I have run it on mips, x86, ppc, and arm. It also runs on several vxworks platforms.

Answer 4

I know for a fact that it runs on PowerPC, since I've used Erlang on my old iBook G4.

Answer 5

Erlang is not a great fit for GPUs.

Erlang has multiple processes all doing different things. Each process is doing conditional branching and sequential ordered things that ordinary CPUs do well.

GPUs are good at having many things doing the same (but independent) operation on the the same bulk of data. Many GPUs have not even had support for branching. They were just performing a mathematical operation on input data points to get an output point.

Answer 6

Yeah, Erlang is portable C, and has a history of running on all sorts of hardware. I keep thinking it would be a fun pet project to develop some hardware for a FPGA that could run BEAM instructions.

Answer 7

Also, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/213337/how-do-i-make-an-already-written-concurrent-program-run-on-a-gpu-array and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210732/gpgpu-vms-any-open-source-projects-to-port-virtual-machines-onto-graphics-proce

Answer 8

From the source distribution for R13B01, "README" file:

Portability

Erlang/OTP should be possible to build from source on any Unix system, including Mac OS X.

Instructions for building from source on Windows are in the file README.win32. Binary releases for Windows can be found at http://www.erlang.org/

At Ericsson we have a "Daily Build and Test" that runs on:

Operating system        Versions
-----------------------------------------------------------
Solaris/Sparc32         8, 9, 10
Solaris/Sparc64         10
Solaris/x86             10
Linux/Suse x86          9.4, 10.1
Linux/Suse x86_64       10.0, 10.1, 11.0
FreeBSD x86             7.1
Mac OS X/Intel          10.4.11 (Tiger), 10.5.6 (Leopard)
Windows                 XP SP3, 2003, Vista