Re:The future of M:N threading
by rdtsc on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @02:11PM
(#6727582)
In Erlang GC is boringly easy. It has separate heaps for processes and processes are isolated. The price to pay is copying some data between processes and handling immutability. But boring is good. They manage a pauseless and concurrent GC without a sweat.
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Well, yes and no. Erlang's GC is simple, but incomplete. Shared data structures like ETS aren't GC-ed, and there are many data structures that you simply can't implement in Erlang because of the way that GC works. For example, you can't implement Java's concurrent hash-map in Erlang. Erlang relies on C code whenever it needs shared data structures.
So the simple and effective GC comes at the cost of a limited programming model. For Erlang, it's the right tradeoff, but not for every environment.