I assume you would be communicating pointers with actor mailboxes, so the only copy is a pointer. I believe Erlang copies data itself into other actor's heaps,

I assume you would be communicating pointers with actor mailboxes, so the only copy is a pointer. I believe Erlang copies data itself into other actor's heaps, that simplifies garbage collection since GC can be done per process and there is only one owning reference to a processes' data. You might find Pony's ORCA interesting which is how they implement garbage collection between actors. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/faculty-of-engineering/computing/public/1718-ug-projects/Daniel-Slocombe-Reliable-Garbage-Collection-in-Pony.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/faculty-of...