Abstract Machine

A lightweight, Erlang-inspired virtual machine for concurrent, fault-tolerant applications in Crystal.

This project combines a clean stack-based bytecode interpreter with actor-model concurrency, lightweight processes, message passing, supervision trees, and built-in fault tolerance — all implemented in pure Crystal.

Inspired by Erlang's BEAM, but designed to be simple, hackable, and embeddable.

Features

• Stack-based VM — Predictable execution with a growing instruction set
• Actor-model concurrency — Thousands of lightweight processes, isolated mailboxes
• Fault tolerance — Linking, monitoring, supervision trees (one-for-one, one-for-all)
• First-class data — Maps, arrays, strings, atoms with native operations
• Built-in primitives — IO, process operations, yield/scheduling hooks
• Pure Crystal — No external dependencies beyond stdlib (easy to embed/extend)

Quick Start

Installation

Add AbstractMachine to your shard.yml:

dependencies:
  abstract_machine:
    github: konjac-lang/abstract_machine

Then run:

shards install

Why choose this project?

• Want to experiment with actor-model semantics without Erlang/OTP?
• Building a domain-specific language or embedded runtime in Crystal?
• Curious how BEAM-like supervision can work in a stack VM?

This project is small (~few thousand LOC), readable, and meant for learning/hacking.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/konjac-lang/abstract_machine/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Giorgi Kavrelishvili - creator and maintainer