Scala's actor library emulates a subset of Erlang's message passing capabilities, but it's far from what Erlang has to offer. Scala's actors are not distributed

Scala's actor library emulates a subset of Erlang's message passing capabilities, but it's far from what Erlang has to offer. Scala's actors are not distributed, they don't have their own heaps (Erlang processes do, to minimize garbage collection sweeps for soft real-time performance), they aren't preemptively scheduled by the VM (the only preemptive scheduling is done by heavy native threads), and they don't have "shared nothing" sematics because Scala lets you send pointers mutable objects between processes. Furthermore, Scala doesn't have hot code swapping or Mnesia, both of which are essential for building scalable fault tolerant systems in Erlang.