Comment by jacquesm
> Why has no one put microkernels and Erlang into a blender? I know there's QNX, but it's still UNIX, not Erlang.
That's a very good question. There are some even lesser known dialects out there that do this but you are going to find it hard to get to the same level of feature completeness that Erlang offers out of the box.
QNX and Erlang embody quite a few of the same principles, but QNX really tried hard to do this at the OS process level in a way that destroyed a lot of the advantages that doing the same under Erlang would have. I think the main obstacle is the fact that the CPU does not support reductions natively. Maybe you could take it a step further and design an FPGA CPU that implements the core features of Erlang at the hardware level?
That would be an absolutely awesome project. Usually when you can think of it someone has already done it so a bit of googling would be a good way to start with that.
You nerd sniped me a little and I'll admit I'm not 100% sure what a reduction is but I've understood it to be a measurement of work for scheduling purposes.
A bit of googling indicates that actually you can use performance monitoring instur to generate an interrupt every n instructions. https://community.intel.com/t5/Software-Tuning-Performance/H...
Which is part of the solution. Presumably the remainder of the solution is then deciding what to schedule next in a way that matches erlang.
Disclaimer: this is based off some googling that makes it seem like hardware support the desired feature exists, not any actual working code.