PON-BEAM proposes reactive, notification-driven redesign of the Erlang VM internals

A research project called PON-BEAM, published on DEV Community, proposes a full re-architecture of the BEAM virtual machine used by Erlang and Elixir. The project applies the Notification-Oriented Paradigm (NOP/PON), originally developed by Dr. Jean Marcelo Simão at UTFPR between 2005 and 2009, as the foundational design principle of the VM itself rather than layering it on top of existing platforms. The core argument is that BEAM's current internals rely on polling and linear scans in critical subsystems — including selective receive, timers, schedulers, and garbage collection — causing temporal and structural redundancy. In the PON-BEAM model, every internal subsystem becomes a reactive entity that pushes notifications when state changes, eliminating the need for periodic polling or repeated search routines. The project's source code is available in the matheuscamarques/pon_beam repository, and the article details empirical benchmark results for each redesigned component.