An Evening with Erlang Co-Inventor Robert Virding on Luerl, Lua on the Beam

Our third Virtual BEAM Meetup GMT for 2021, bringing together the community in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas is happening on Thursday, April 29th with Erlang co-inventor Robert Virding. He will be talking about porting languages to the BEAM, and more specifically, Luerl, used in production in one of the major European banks. BYOB, Coffee & Orange Juice, lots of passion, curiosity and desire to learn and share. Start time is 6pm GMT (London), 7pm CET (Paris, Stockholm), 1pm EST (New York) and 10am PST (San Francisco, Vancouver). After the talks, come and demo your libraries, give lightning talks, ask questions or share your experiences.

Meetup links will be made available closer to the date, but remember that to access them, you need to register before the meetup starts. If new to the group, please sign up with your full name and photo. Due to past incidents, we vet every user joining the group, a necessary when you allow everyone to unmute themselves. Aliases will not be let into the meeting. We will most likely be using Tucan for this meetup.

Schedule (all times are in GMT):

6.00pm: Welcome & Announcements
6.05pm: Robert Virding: Luerl - an implementation of Lua on the Erlang VM
6.50 pm -late: We will break up into themed bubbles. This month, one will be dedicated to BEAM languages where you can ask questions. The second bubble will be dedicated to show and tell, where you can demo libraries and other cool applications or give a lightning talk. You can also connect with other users, and talk about anything else.

Title: Luerl - an implementation of Lua on the Erlang VM

Abstract: Luerl is an implementation of Lua in Erlang which runs natively on the Erlang VM. Lua programs running in Luerl are part of the Erlang system and therefore have full access to all of the features of the Erlang system. This talk will give a brief description of the main properties of the Erlang VM and how Luerl implemented and how it can interact with the Erlang system. It will also show a simple example program demonstrating these features.

Bio: Robert Virding is Principal Language Expert at Erlang Solutions. While at Ericsson, Robert was one of the original members of the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, and co-inventor of the Erlang language. He took part in the original system design and contributed much of the original libraries, as well as to the current compiler. While at the lab he also did a lot of work on the implementation of logic and functional languages and on garbage collection. He has also worked as an entrepreneur and was one of the co-founders of one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail). Robert also worked a number of years at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) Modelling and Simulations Group. He co-authored the first book (Prentice-Hall) on Erlang, and is regularly invited to teach and present throughout the world.