Erlang is famous for its introspecting powers. You can get a lot of information about the processes running in your nodes without any external tool. One of the functions that provide that information is erlang:process_info/1,2.
Well, this article is not about it. It’s just about this unintuitive but understandable situation we found with Manuel Rubio and Mário Luís Guimarães on the Erlang Slack a long time ago…
I love seeing articles like this where people are digging around in the lower levels of what is going on. Most of the time we just take for granted what is happening is correct even when sometimes it is not. Even though I don’t know Erlang at all, it is fun seeing the though process of the author. 
You know, rebuilding the ‘basics’ low level stuff of how OTP/BEAM works in another language as an/a-set of articles would be fascinating to understand how it all works…
Wouldn’t it though! That would be awesome to see.
Quinn Wilton has been discussion something similar on Twitter recently:
She has indicated that the goal (at least initially) is not quite the Beam but more along the lines of a simple abstract virtual machine that is something “beam-like”.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the developer experience of some of the Erlang patterns in statically typed languages.
I’m porting some of the Erlang concepts to a Rust VM/library, but I have been struggling to re-create this dynamic playfulness and introspection that Erlang/Elixir gives you. This could be an interesting topic to explore.
