Then surely you know support for transactions is built as a layer on top of ETS? I actually don't like Erlang as a whole, because it lacks a static type system

Then surely you know support for transactions is built as a layer on top of ETS? I actually don't like Erlang as a whole, because it lacks a static type system, but that's besides the point. I reject characterising the BEAM VM's GC as not-really-good, especially in concurrency context. I believe the immutable, shared-nothing, message-passing model is a superior solution to the data problem than the threads-and-locks model. Actual memory sharing is an optimization which can be applied by the runtime system, as it's done for binaries in Erlang.