alt Hacker NewsThe JVM is perfectly capable of Golang-style green threads now. As for Erlang, the creator of Clojure have commented in the past on why he dislikes the Actor model, and I think it is a fair criticism. Sometimes I see people praising Erlang VM as some panacea in which all the VMs should strive to be like. This is overly simplistic in my opinion, and ignores the huge trade-offs that the Erlang VM has.
You might be speed-running to a conclusion and squinting too hard if you use the word "panacea". Similar to the weird childish name-calling people do in Rust threads (somebody met one brainless zealot and now of course they'll judge a community of hundreds of thousands of devs by that one loony).
I used Java, Golang, Rust, Elixir (so Erlang).
My opinion is informed. STM / share-nothing-actors lend themselves amazingly well to online services for many reasons, better explained by other people and documented elsewhere (and I did not come here to advocate but to express preference and offer the take of somebody who has been around).
I am not denying that the JVM might have almost caught up in the meantime. More than a decade ago it did not.
And yes the BEAM VM is absolutely and markedly _not_ a panacea. It has a few weird sharp edges. It's just that in my work I have found having to avoid them still worth it compared to the alternatives (global mutability and more primitive parallelism which was the case for the JVM for decades).