And maybe in a project with truly massive memory requirements that's an issue. I've never encountered it (as an issue that is) But I only got into the JVM on 1.6 with Jruby, made the switch to Scala around 1.7, and have been on 1.8 pretty much since release.
A 3GB heap is pretty typical, but that's mostly just room for cache.
If you're writing web-apps, there's a ridiculous amount of opportunity for using Actors to good effect.
On the other hand I try to keep an eye on resources. I try not to throw millions of messages at an Actor. If I'm batch processing, I'm probably work-pulling, mapping and prefetching my Sources to attempt to minimize latency. Even if I could tune mailbox sizes to avoid all that I prefer not to code in upper bounds on input.
I would be surprised to hear this is a widespread problem in people's work. You don't often hear the same complaints from Rubyists for example and they're much worse off in that regard. So I feel like this case is massively overstated.
But if you have that problem I can certainly see how that might figure into your equation.
Not everything is web-apps either. If you've got soft realtime requirements(<30ms) GC will hurt you. We spend a lot of time doing twists-and-turns in Java to not allocate anything to avoid that Gen-0 GC.
Erlang's GC model is just incredibly elegant. Almost like pooled allocators that we used to use in GameDev but in a completely transparent and intuitive way.
I'll concede that. But you have to admit this is an incredibly niche problem space.
OTOH the JVM will have much higher throughput on the other 99% of apps.
Don't get me wrong. I like Erlang. It's definitely in my top.. Uhm... 3 languages of interest. Being the only other language I know with Pattern Matching is a huge huge part of that.
For most developers I'd just be careful in making that jump. Because most of what this article is about isn't Erlang specific. It's more like a pretty small club of platforms/languages. IMO.
Yeah, but real-time is about latency not throughput :).
FWIW a lot of game engines use message passing between components/actors due to the low coupling and architectural benefits so it's not quite as small of a domain as you think.
