Lightweight threads in Erlang/Elixir were created as a unit of fault tolerance. A lightweight thread can suddenly exit when it hits an error, and the VM mechani

Lightweight threads in Erlang/Elixir were created as a unit of fault tolerance. A lightweight thread can suddenly exit when it hits an error, and the VM mechanisms give you guarantees that any resource it owned will be freed (memory, sockets, registered name, ETS tables, etc.) Using signals and monitors you can extend this to any other type of resources, for instance DB connections in an SQL adapter library. That's the original advantage over OS threads.