Can you explain some more or point to the exact part of the research paper. When you say "GC'ing actors themselves vs GC'ing memory reachable from actor" what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about the process dictionary and mailbox vs the state of actor passed through its loop function?

For arguments' sake here is what a simple Erlang actor looks like:

    loop(State) -> 
      ...
      loop(NewState).
      ...

Maybe you can spawn it with:

    Pid = spawn(fun () -> loop(InitState) end)