AtomVM

Brings Erlang, Elixir and other functional languages to really small systems.

AtomVM implements from scratch a minimal Erlang VM that supports a subset of ErlangVM features and that is able to run unmodified BEAM binaries on really small systems like MCUs.

Supported Platforms

• Linux, macOS, FreeBSD (generic unix)
• ESP32 SoC (with IDF/FreeRTOS, see README.ESP32.Md)
• STM32 MCUs (with LibOpenCM3, see README.STM32.Md)

AtomVM aims to be easily portable to new platforms with a minimum effort, so additional platforms might be supported in a near future.

Getting Started

Dependencies

Required for building:

• CMake (CMake build system)
• gperf (GNU Perfect Hash Function Generator)
• erlc (erlang compiler) for OTP 21, 22 or 23
• elixirc (elixir compiler)

Optional:

• zlib (zlib compression and decompression library) is optionally needed to run standard BEAM files (without uncompressed literals extension).

Documentation and Coverage:

• gcov and lcov are optionally required to generate coverage report (make coverage).
• doxygen is optionally required to generate documentation (make doc).

Step-by-Step Build Instructions (generic unix platform)

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ ./src/AtomVM ./examples/erlang/hello_world.avm

If you are using OTP 22 or 23, you need to disable FP opcodes with:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DAVM_DISABLE_FP=on ..
$ make
$ ./src/AtomVM ./examples/erlang/hello_world.avm

Run tests within build directory with:

$ ./tests/test-erlang
$ ./tests/test-structs
$ ./src/AtomVM ./tests/libs/estdlib/test_estdlib.avm
$ ./src/AtomVM ./tests/libs/eavmlib/test_eavmlib.avm
$ ./src/AtomVM ./tests/libs/alisp/test_alisp.avm

See also README.ESP32.Md and README.STM32.Md for platform specific build instructions.

Project Status

AtomVM is still in its early stages, but it can run simple applications similar to those available in examples and tests.

AtomVM might crash with a similar message:

Undecoded opcode: 15
Aborted (core dumped)

This basically means that an instruction has not been implemented yet, or that an outdated version has been used. Please, make sure to always run AtomVM using latest version.

Right now only binaries compiled with OTP 20-23 are supported.

Known Limitations

This project is a work in progress, so there are several known limitations, that will prevent to run unmodified software, some of them are:

• There is a minimal standard library, so several standard functions are missing.
• Several instructions are not yet implemented.

All of these limitations are going to be fixed in a reasonable amount of time.

About This Project

This project has been created by Davide Bettio, and now is developed from a growing number of contributors.

How to Contribute

Any kind of contribution is welcome, you can either contribute to this repository by improving the virtual machine, the core libraries or the documentation or by contributing to any of the organization repositories.

License

This project is under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.