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Paul Schoenfelder

Prolific open source contributor, borderline workaholic. Speaker @ ElixirConf, Code BEAM SF, LoneStar Elixir

Paul is currently an Architectural Engineer at DockYard, he came to Erlang and Elixir after about 10 years of working with .NET and JVM languages and has spent the past 4 years working with the BEAM professionally.

Paul is the author of a variety of tools and libraries for Elixir, most notably Distillery and Timex.

Past Activities

Paul Schoenfelder
Code Mesh LDN
08 Nov 2019
14.30 - 15.15

Lumen - Bringing the BEAM to WebAssembly and beyond

Lumen is a new compiler and runtime for BEAM languages (currently Erlang and Elixir) that supports targeting environments that were previously unsupported or infeasible for the BEAM virtual machine, e.g. WebAssembly, bare metal embedded hardware and more.

To best support these new targets, Lumen takes an alternative implementation approach compared to the BEAM. Rather than being constructed as a compiler that produces bytecode which is then executed by a virtual machine, Lumen is instead an ahead-of-time compiler that produces native code in the form of a standalone executable. It builds on the capabilities and ecosystem provided by the Rust and LLVM toolchains and makes it possible to apply BEAM languages to domains that were previously inaccessible.

The beta release of Lumen in late August 2019 provided an early preview of the new compiler, with primary support for WebAssembly, as well as secondary support for x86_64. This talk will share more about Lumen, where it is currently, and what the team has planned for it in the near future and beyond.

THIS TALK IN THREE WORDS

BEAM

WebAssembly

Compilers

OBJECTIVES

The talk will be a mix of high-level and technical topics. Starting with a quick intro on what Lumen is, with a quick demonstration of how it works, before moving on to talk about why the team built it, how it is designed, and where they plan to take it in the future.

Paul also plans to share pointers on how to get involved and answer any questions if there is time. 

TARGET AUDIENCE

Everyone with an interest in the BEAM or compilers.

Paul Schoenfelder
Code BEAM SF 2018
16 Mar 2018
16.15 - 17.00

Releases and Elixir: Envisioning a more perfect union

In this talk I am going to share how Elixir's deployment tooling has gotten to where it is today, what problems we've addressed, what problems remain, and going into the future, how we're planning to evolve and improve.

The practical problems the tools aimed to address early on have been largely resolved. However, as Elixir draws more developers from other languages, we've had to face the fact that we have not only a perception problem, but a variety of usability issues that early adopters have largely not noticed or cared about. Addressing these problems is the primary goal of the next stage of evolution in these tools, as well as making releases part of the core Elixir toolchain.

If you are currently deploying Elixir in production, or are looking to do so, you will be interested in this talk.