Editing Draft:Elixir/OS processes (section)

==== Inside the BEAM ====
Despite its retro-futuristic appearance of being one of the most time-tested yet forward-facing programming environments, I was brought back to Earth by digging around inside the VM to find that it's just a C program like any other.  There's nothing holy about the BEAM emulator, there are some good and some great ideas about functional languages and they're buried in a mass of ancient procedural ifdefs, with unnerving memory management and typedefs wrapping the size of an integer on various platforms, just like you might find in other relics from the dark ages of computing, next to the Firefox or linux kernel source code.

Tantalizingly, message-passing is at the core of the VM, but is not a first-class concept when reaching out to external processes.  There's some fancy footwork with [[W:Anonymous pipe|pipes]] and [[W:Dup (system call)|dup]], but communication is done with enums, unions, and bit-rattling stdlib.  I love it, but... it might something to look at on another rainy day.