The Isolation Trap: Erlang

2 days ago

Erlang's actor model emphasizes concurrency through isolation, with processes having separate heaps and communicating via copied messages.
Despite its strengths, Erlang's isolation model still faces issues like deadlocks, mailbox overflows, and race conditions.
Erlang provides mitigations for these issues, but they rely heavily on programmer discipline and conventions rather than language enforcement.
Performance limitations of the isolation model lead to the introduction of shared mutable state mechanisms like ETS, persistent_term, and atomics.
Shared mutable state reintroduces classic concurrency problems, such as race conditions and TOCTOU bugs, which Erlang was designed to avoid.
The cycle of isolation leading to performance bottlenecks and then to shared state highlights a fundamental tension in concurrency models.

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