Why We Rewrote Goldrush (And What We Kept)

goldrush by DeadZen is one of the most underappreciated libraries in the Erlang ecosystem. Its core innovation -- compiling event matching queries into constant-time pattern matching trees -- is genuinely brilliant.

What goldrush Got Right

The key insight is that event stream processing is fundamentally a pattern matching problem. goldrush compiles query specifications into Erlang modules at runtime, giving you O(1) dispatch regardless of how many patterns you have. This is orders of magnitude faster than the naive approach of iterating through patterns.

What We Added

goldclaw preserves goldrush's core but adds three layers: (1) Markdown compilation -- your .md files parse into goldrush query trees, (2) AI augmentation -- LLM-powered intent analysis, TTS/STT, anomaly detection, (3) Zero-config DX -- `npx create-goldclaw` gives you a working project instantly.

For Erlang/Elixir Developers

If you already know OTP, goldclaw will feel like home. Supervision trees, gen_servers, ETS tables -- it's all there. The markdown layer is syntactic sugar that compiles down to the same primitives you'd write by hand, just faster and more maintainable.

For Everyone Else

If you're coming from Node.js, Python, Go, or anything else -- goldclaw is your on-ramp to the most battle-tested runtime in existence. The BEAM VM has been running telecom infrastructure for 30+ years. Your JavaScript event loop wishes it could.