OMG, guys, this is getting really strange. Half of the commenters here read the word "process" and jumped to their own conclusions, possibly true in general, bu

OMG, guys, this is getting really strange. Half of the commenters here read the word "process" and jumped to their own conclusions, possibly true in general, but obviously wrong in the case of Erlang. It bears repeating: Erlang processes are not OS-level processes. Erlang Virtual Machine, BEAM, runs in a single OS-level process. Erlang processes are closer to green-threads or Tasklets as known in Stackless Python. They are extremely lightweight, implicitly scheduled user-space tasks, which share no memory. Erlang schedules its processes on a pool of OS-level threads for optimal utilization of CPU cores, but this is an implementation detail. What's important is that Erlang processes are providing isolation in terms of memory used and error handling, just like OS-level processes. Conceptually both kinds of processes are very similar, but their implementations are nothing alike.