Could the Java Virtual Machine be used to run Erlang?
Yes, and it would be rather nice to be able to benefit from the considerable effort being put into making the JVM go faster. There are a couple of obstacles: the JVM does not provide support for tail recursion or tagged data types. Both of these deficiencies can be worked around at a cost. The result will probably be slower and use more memory than a VM written for Erlang. Other languages with roughly similar characteristics to Erlang have been written to run on the JVM. Benchmarks from such systems (e.g. KAWA) show a significant performance penalty from running on the JVM.
