It's true that when Erlang was first made, machines were single-core, so parallel execution was not possible on one machine. However, the "no shared memory" pro

It's true that when Erlang was first made, machines were single-core, so parallel execution was not possible on one machine. However, the "no shared memory" process model made transitioning to true parallelism much simpler. The ability to run one scheduler per core was added around 2005 I think. See https://hamidreza-s.github.io/erlang/scheduling/real-time/preemptive/migration/2016/02/09/erlang-scheduler-details.html https://hamidreza-s.github.io/erlang/scheduling/real-time/pr... Also: > Erlang achieves concurrency by interleaving the execution of processes on the Erlang virtual machine, the BEAM. On a multi-core processor the BEAM can also achieve parallelism by running one scheduler per core and executing one Erlang process per scheduler. The designer of an Erlang system can achieve further parallelism by distributing the system on several computers. > https://happi.github.io/theBeamBook/ https://happi.github.io/theBeamBook/ My understanding is that the BEAM will also do "work stealing" among schedulers to take better advantage of the available CPUs.