Communicating with the outside world: a look at the BEAM's External Term Format

The BEAM uses Erlang's External Term Format (ETF) to send data to the outside world, representing BEAM types as binary data. This talk takes a look at ETF itself and at an Elm-language implementation for browsers, demonstrating performance and size benefits over formats like JSON, and shows why ETF matters across BEAM systems and how it can be applied across tech stacks.