Erlang's Internal Data Representation Jun 28 th , 2016 5:12 pm I find it interesting how the Erlang BEAM engine represents data in memory. Quick look: An Erlang list This is the in-memory layout of the Erlang list "phi" . [112, 104, 105] As a reminder, Erlang treats a string as a list of small integers; 'p' , for instance, is 112 . Don’t worry too much about the bitwise details of the diagram - we