Digging through the garbage

The BEAM was designed to run on 1980s hardware and never crash. How does it manage to run for so long on machines with such little memory and still have such good soft-real-time performance? This talk explores garbage collection fundamentals — generational collectors, heaps, and stacks — for beginners, while offering more advanced viewers insights into monitoring memory usage through BEAM tracing events and optimisation techniques for resource-constrained environments such as IoT devices.