A distinct feature of the Erlang VM is the ability to trace and debug on a live system. In this tutorial we want to give people an overview of the facilities in the Erlang VM that helps a developer or administrator figure out errors in programs while they are running. The ability to operate on a live production system is a valuable trait of concurrent systems. Apart from Tracing and debugging, we will also be covering match specifications and we will introduce the "Restricted debugger" from the "eper" suite by Mats Cronqvist.

After the success of the Java Hot Spot VM, just-in-time compilers are become more and more popular in more and more languages. Just-in-time compilers attempt to make code run faster by compiling parts of your programs to native code in order to speed up execution time. Just-in-time compilers have been shown to speed up performance by up to a factor of 5 for specific benchmarks and it is about time that the Erlang VM is fitted with one of its own.

This talk will give a brief overview of the different approaches one can take to just-in-time compiling and then dive into the details of how the Erlang VM executes code. After laying the ground work I will try to explain how a JIT can be done for the Erlang VM and finish of with a status report of what work has been done so far.