Erlang is a concurrent programming language designed for prototyping and implementing reliable real-time systems. In its design Erlanginherits someideas fromconcurrent logic programminglanguages. Erlang is used ina number of experimental telephony applications both within and outside Ericsson [1 ]. In this paper we describe a very ecient and portable sequential implementation of Erlang where Erlang programs are compiled into the Clanguage. Our preliminary evaluation results showthat theperformance of our Erlangsystemis not far fromthe performance of highly optimized Ccode. The proposed implementation technique can be easily applied to implementation of other concurrent high-level languages (e.g. Janus andKL1).