> Likewise, erlang's lightweight processes are exactly the same -- threads. The fact that they can be modeled to arbitrary numbers of operating system threads is irrelevant to the nature of the model -- one in which execution of a thread can proceed independently of others, implemented via context switching of execution state across those threads, able to access shared state.
From Wikipedia:
> The Erlang virtual machine has what might be called 'green processes' - they are like operating system processes (they do not share state like threads do) but are implemented within the Erlang Run Time System (erts). These are sometimes (erroneously) cited as 'green threads'.
Going back to Ruby, sure, threads might be theoretically better than processes, but in practical terms, other things are the real bottleneck, so it ends up not really mattering that much.
> The Erlang virtual machine has what might be called 'green processes' - they are like operating system processes (they do not share state like threads do) but are implemented within the Erlang Run Time System (erts). These are sometimes (erroneously) cited as 'green threads'.
Erlang processes' implementations share internal mutable state, despite the fact that the inter-process messaging API available via the runtime does not expose this. They have to -- internal cooperative context switching can't be implemented without shared mutable state.
They're threads.
Going back to Ruby, sure, threads might be theoretically better than processes, but in practical terms, other things are the real bottleneck, so it ends up not really mattering that much.
I'm not sure I follow. Is this something like "ruby is really, really slow, so no need to worry about concurrency" ?
From Wikipedia:
> The Erlang virtual machine has what might be called 'green processes' - they are like operating system processes (they do not share state like threads do) but are implemented within the Erlang Run Time System (erts). These are sometimes (erroneously) cited as 'green threads'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads
Going back to Ruby, sure, threads might be theoretically better than processes, but in practical terms, other things are the real bottleneck, so it ends up not really mattering that much.