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Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
’s not about lightweight processes and message passing… I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
I highly commend reading his thesis and forming your own opinion, but to me it’s clear that the big idea there isn’t lightweight processes and message passing, but rather the generic components which in Erlang are called behaviours. At best one might be able to claim that lightweight processes and supervisors are the key mechanisms at play, but I think it would be more honest to recognise the structure that behaviours provide and how that ultimately leads to reliable software. This begs the question: why aren’t language and library designers stealing the structure behind Erlang’s behaviours, rather than copying the ideas of lightweight processes and message passing?
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