its-just-beam

Jido: Autonomous Agent Framework for Elixir ↗

project

agentjido · December 2024

Agents are immutable data structures with a single cmd/2 operation — state changes are pure data transformations, making agent behavior deterministic, testable, and auditable without running processes
The OTP runtime layer (GenServer-based AgentServer) adds parent-child hierarchies and supervision, cleanly separating pure agent logic from lifecycle, fault recovery, and resource limits
Directive-based effects (spawn, schedule, emit) keep side effects as data descriptions rather than immediate actions, giving supervisors a chance to intercept, gate, or deny agent actions before they execute

project

elixir-lang.org · 2012

Functional language built on the BEAM that adds modern ergonomics (macros, protocols, mix tooling) without sacrificing Erlang’s runtime guarantees
Processes are the unit of isolation and concurrency — each is a lightweight actor with its own heap, communicating only through message passing
The language design enforces the “let it crash” philosophy by making processes cheap and supervision trees idiomatic

project

GitHub · 2017

Deep dive into BEAM virtual machine internals: schedulers, memory management, garbage collection, and the process model
Explains how the BEAM achieves soft real-time properties through preemptive scheduling based on reduction counts, not time slices
Essential reference for understanding why BEAM processes are cheap (< 1KB initial heap) and how the VM enables millions of concurrent processes