Ergo: Erlang-inspired event driven actor framework in Go

Three big differences in comparison with Erlang: 1- Cannot externally kill a process (yes, ergo process have a Kill method but the process will be in a "zombie" state until the current message handlers returns... maybe stuck forever) 2- No hot code reloading. 3- No per-process GC.

I've never written any Erlang before--why do I care about per-process GC?

Also, for anyone not completely familiar with Erlang's terminology, the translation of "per process garbage collection" to Go would be "per goroutine garbage collection". As mentioned in a sibling comment, this allows Erlang style garbage collection to avoid pausing the entire operating system process when running garbage collectin.

Per-process GC is an optimization similar to nurseries in regular collectors, esp any object that has been sent in a message must be visible globally (yes there could be small object optimizations but that would increase sender complexity).

Also an overlooked part here is that the global Erlang GC is easier to parallellize and/or keep incremental since it won't have object cycles sans PID's (that probably have special handling anyhow).

TlDr; GC's become way harder as soon as you have cyclic objects, Erlang avoids it and thus parts of it being good is more about Erlang being "simple".