Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs
by Volundr on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @10:51AM
(#37308794)
Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced in Go.
Go routines were pretty directly inspired by Erlang processes, so in terms of primitives I'd say they are very similar, aside from go lacking the distributed features you already mentioned.
Where Erlang/Elixir add value beyond go routines is what OTP (kind of the standard library) provides on top. Pre-built abstractions like GenServer for long running processes, Genstage for producer/consumer pipelines and supervision trees for making sure your processes haven't crashed and restarting them and their dependents if they have.
Go routines were pretty directly inspired by Erlang processes, so in terms of primitives I'd say they are very similar, aside from go lacking the distributed features you already mentioned.
Where Erlang/Elixir add value beyond go routines is what OTP (kind of the standard library) provides on top. Pre-built abstractions like GenServer for long running processes, Genstage for producer/consumer pipelines and supervision trees for making sure your processes haven't crashed and restarting them and their dependents if they have.