Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes

Posted by dannote 22 hours ago

Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes(github.com)

QuickBEAM is a JavaScript runtime embedded inside the Erlang/OTP VM.

If you’re building a full-stack app, JavaScript tends to leak in anyway — frontend, SSR, or third-party code.

QuickBEAM runs that JavaScript inside OTP supervision trees.

Each runtime is a process with a `Beam` global that can: - call Elixir code - send/receive messages - spawn and monitor processes - inspect runtime/system state

It also provides browser-style APIs backed by OTP/native primitives (fetch, WebSocket, Worker, BroadcastChannel, localStorage, native DOM, etc.).

This makes it usable for: - SSR - sandboxed user code - per-connection state - backend JS with direct OTP interop

Notable bits:

- JS runtimes are supervised and restartable - sandboxing with memory/reduction limits and API control - native DOM that Erlang can read directly (no string rendering step) - no JSON boundary between JS and Erlang - built-in TypeScript, npm support, and native addons

QuickBEAM is part of Elixir Volt — a full-stack frontend toolchain built on Erlang/OTP with no Node.js.

Still early, feedback welcome.

39 points | 4 comments

jbpd924 1 hour ago|

Interesting!! I've been playing around with QuickJS lately and uses Elixir at work.

I'm interested to hear about your sandboxing approach running untrusted JS code. So you are setting an memory/reduction limit to the process which 100% is a good idea. What other defense-in-depth strategies are you using? possible support for seccomp in the future?

waffleophagus 1 hour ago||

Running JS on the Beam VM, all written in C. I don't know if this is just cursed, or absolutely brilliant, either way I love it and will be following closely. Will definitely have to play with it.

dnautics 23 minutes ago||

love this! a while back i noodled around with this idea, but didn't get that far:

https://github.com/ityonemo/yavascript

glad to see someone do a fuller implementation!

theflyinghorse 2 hours ago|

This is very interest to me because we have accumulated a few node packages containing logic that services simply import. So in theory I could now use those node packages in elixir?