Davide Bettio
Creator of AtomVM
Padova, Italy
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Davide Bettio is a long-time open source enthusiast. Passionate about embedded systems since high school, he also contributed early on to KDE. In 2017, he created AtomVM to run Elixir and Erlang on tiny microcontrollers with only a few kilobytes of RAM. Today, he is working full-time on AtomVM. When he’s not coding, Davide enjoys hiking in the Alps.
The AtomVM and New Horizons for Elixir
Elixir owes a lot to the BEAM Virtual Machine. Thanks to its capabilities and guarantees, we can do everything from web development to AI and media streaming, in a concurrent and fault-tolerant way. However, certain environments with limited resources or different constraints, such as microcontrollers, are not suitable for the BEAM. Does it mean we should abandon the idea of using Elixir in these environments? Not anymore. We have AtomVM - an alternative implementation of the BEAM - designed specifically to run on microcontrollers!
That proves an important point: we can run Elixir in different runtimes with different design choices and tradeoffs! That opens up whole new possibilities as we can make Elixir even more versatile than it is today.
With that in mind, a small team at Software Mansion paired with the Atom VM team to run Elixir on a whole new platform. To do so, we needed a deep understanding of the AtomVM internals and augment its feature parity with the BEAM. What have we come up with? We can't wait to share the results with you, and they're very promising!
AtomVM: Unlocking the power of BEAM on Tiny Microcontrollers and Beyond
While Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam are well-known for building robust, scalable systems, this talk will remind you that their power extends far beyond massive clusters – enabling them to run on cheap devices so small they fit in the palm of your hand.
In this talk, we'll explore the fundamental concepts of embedded systems and how AtomVM carves out its unique niche, distinguishing itself from other embedded BEAM initiatives like Nerves.
(Beyond just IoT, we'll journey through the broader horizons of AtomVM. Discover its fascinating applications in the web with WebAssembly (WASM) and Emscripten – including a nod to the exciting Popcorn project for running Elixir directly in the browser – and explore compelling new use cases for AtomVM on Linux.)
Designed specifically for Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam developers, this session will feature practical examples in all three languages, demonstrating how familiar BEAM paradigms translate to these new environments. I'll share insights and actionable information, equipping you to envision and build the next generation of small-footprint applications.
Atomic-Scale Elixir
Last year at ElixirConf EU 2025, we briefly introduced AtomVM and the new horizons on the web with Popcorn.
This year, we'll go deeper into the hardware world, discovering how Elixir can be used for physical computing, even on inexpensive, resource-constrained microcontrollers.
This talk will go beyond the introduction, with a hands-on approach to using AtomVM to build a real project, using the Elixir tools and workflow available today.
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