3 ms·

That sort of problem is beyond the scope of the runtime in any case, isn't it? In either of the examples you offered (holding a lock, coordinating with other pr

That sort of problem is beyond the scope of the runtime in any case, isn't it? In either of the examples you offered (holding a lock, coordinating with other processes), there must be timeouts enforced by the lock or the other processes so that, if something goes wrong, the system isn't waiting for a crashed process to continue the work. Erlang/Elixir do make this pretty easy to manage, including the scenario where the process does recover by reverting back to a known good state. It won't do it for you automatically, but it exposes enough surface area to make problems like that solvable without reaching for a lot of extra tools - it's built into the runtime.

cle 3y ago
> That sort of problem is beyond the scope of the runtime in any case, isn't it? Yes, which is why Go's outright crashing also makes sense to me...both Go and Erlang's behavior seem conceptually the same, with some architectural tradeoffs. It's not really that different for a process to die and restart. If some shared resource reaches an undefined state, then you have to kill everything and reset your state anyway. I suppose Go's behavior lends itself better to "microservices", whereas Erlang's behavior is better suited for "monolith" processes that do a lot of different things. IMO either of these are better than Java's default behavior of silently swallowing the exception and allowing the thread to quietly die.