Where can I get the latest specification of Erlang BEAM VM?

Question

I want to read the instruction set for the BEAM VM and learn its internals, but what I can find with google is all out-dated.

Answer 1

The Erlang-on-Xen project did a pretty extensive write-up of all the current BEAM instructions: http://erlangonxen.org/more/beam

Here's a historical description, which explains pretty well how things actually work: http://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html

This (long) mailing list thread may also be of interest: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-May/066515.html - At least the link to http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/beam_file_format.html

Edit (2017): Nowadays, there is also the BEAM Book: https://github.com/happi/theBeamBook