"Is this because the erlang/otp concepts are insufficient or outdated?" Insufficient or outdated is a pretty loaded term. What they are is really, really tied

"Is this because the erlang/otp concepts are insufficient or outdated?" Insufficient or outdated is a pretty loaded term. What they are is really, really tied to the Erlang worldview, of immutable functions, mailbox APIs that can receive messages out of order, the way they have "behaviors" as a really limited kind of class system, and other details of Erlang. This isn't a criticism, it's really a good thing. An Erlang library should harmonize with Erlang, after all. But when you port them into environments that don't have all those characteristics, the optimal library that harmonizes with that environment looks different. In Go, for instance, rather than the whole gen_server thing, the idiomatic approach to this sort of thing tends to look a lot more like: for { select { case msg1 := me.Chan1: me.handleMsg1(msg1) case msg2 := me.Chan2: me.handleMsg2(msg2) // etc. } } Trying to jam Go code into the gen_server framework is very klunky. Another reason is that while Go and Erlang both have fairly weak type systems, they are weak in very different ways. It is idiomatic in Erlang to label what kind of message something is by making it the first atom in a tuple. Then you can use Erlang's pattern matching in functions to implement many different message types based on what you send to the gen_server. This ports into Go terribly. Go does it in very different ways. "I suggested it would be good to capture these core concepts in standardized libraries for a range of languages, but now I am not so sure." No, it really doesn't work. Even two languages in the same basic family can end up with significant differences in patterns (witness Ruby versus Python, for instance, virtually the same language, significant difference in what is idiomatic). Trying to stretch a library from a language that is based on a super weak type system (on purpose; it is part of the Erlang solution to cross-version communication), immutability, pattern matching, and mailboxes into a language with a weak type system in a different way, mutability, conventional function calls, channels (very different than mailboxes), and all the other relevant differences may be theoretically possible, but it will always result in foreign environments in the language. You can actually see this in the real world by the way that C is the de facto cross-language in-process bus on Linux. It bends everything that has to use it. Personally I consider it one of the biggest impediments to a new language getting off the ground because of the design decisions it forces on a new language at a young age. We are, slowly, getting past this in a variety of ways, but it's hard.