February 24, 2026

293: The BEAM as the Universal Runtime

28 minutes

News includes Hackney v3.1.0 dropping ~1.3 million lines of C code in favor of a pure Erlang QUIC implementation for HTTP/3 support, Benoît Chesneau's Hornbeam 1.0.0 bringing Erlang-powered hosting to Python web apps with performance that puts Gunicorn to shame, the Easel library offering a Canvas 2D drawing API for Elixir that works with Phoenix LiveView and native WX windows, Hologram v0.7.0 hitting a major milestone with client-side Erlang runtime coverage jumping from 34% to 96%, and more!

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/293

Elixir Community News

https://paraxial.io/ – Paraxial.io is sponsoring today's show! Sign up for a free trial of Paraxial.io today and mention Thinking Elixir when you schedule a demo for a special offer.

https://nitter.net/benoitc/status/2023675416465023212 – Benoît Chesneau announces Hackney v3.1.0, a simple HTTP client for Erlang, now with HTTP/3 support via pure Erlang — no C compiler, CMake, or Go required.

https://github.com/benoitc/hackney/releases/tag/3.1.0 – Hackney v3.1.0 release notes. Removes ~1.3M lines of C code (lsquic, BoringSSL, NIF) and replaces them with a pure Erlang QUIC implementation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC – Background on QUIC, the general-purpose transport layer protocol underlying HTTP/3 support in Hackney v3.1.0.

https://nitter.net/benoitc/status/2023711566370402574 – Benoît Chesneau announces Hornbeam 1.0.0, an Erlang-powered WSGI/ASGI server for Python apps — 9x faster than Gunicorn, 10x lower latency.

https://github.com/benoitc/hornbeam – Hornbeam GitHub repository. Run Flask, FastAPI, and Django on the BEAM with Erlang's concurrency, resilience, and distribution.

https://hornbeam.dev/ – Hornbeam landing site — "When Python Meets Erlang." Highlights AI readiness, distributed clustering, supervisors, and no GIL concerns.

https://nitter.net/benoitc/status/2024066551092031773 – Follow-up post announcing Hornbeam v1.3.0, achieving 68k req/s — 2x faster than Uvicorn/Gunicorn — with new NIF modules for direct C-level marshalling.

https://github.com/ivarvong/pyex – PyEx — run LLM-generated Python inside your Elixir app with no containers, no ports, and no process isolation. Related project showing BEAM/Python integration.

https://bsky.app/profile/peregrine.bsky.social/post/3mehfa2urpc2w – Jason Stiebs announces Easel v0.2.0, a Canvas 2D API for Elixir enabling drawing to Phoenix LiveView, native WX windows, or custom backends.

https://github.com/jeregrine/Easel – Easel GitHub repository. Supports layers, animations, event handling, templating, and both LiveView and Wx rendering backends.

https://easel-demo.fly.dev/ – Live demo of Easel running on Fly.io — all computations done in Elixir, sent over WebSocket to a canvas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids – Background on Boids, the artificial life program simulating flocking behaviour that inspired Easel's visual simulation capabilities.

https://nitter.net/Bart_Blast/status/2021741047903105527 – Hologram v0.7.0 announced — 49 contributors ported 150 Erlang functions to JS, pushing client-side Erlang runtime coverage from 34% to 96%.

https://hologram.page/blog/porting-initiative-delivers-hologram-v0-7-0 – Hologram v0.7.0 blog post detailing the porting initiative. Overall Elixir standard library readiness grew from 74% to 87%, moving closer to full-stack pure Elixir development.

Tidewave now supports OpenCode, and is deprecating "Bring your own key" support in favor of Codex, Claude Code, or OpenCode for richer agent features like MCPs, skills, planning, and compaction.

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