Erlang Concurrency

Erlang's lightweight processes on BEAM let you spawn thousands of isolated actors that communicate asynchronously via message passing. Each process is independent, enabling massively scalable concurrent systems without shared memory or traditional threading overhead.

Links create bidirectional fault propagation—when a linked process crashes, the other exits by default. Monitors are unidirectional observers that send notifications without terminating the monitoring process, giving you fine-grained error handling without cascade failures.

Erlang's selective receive lets processes pattern-match incoming messages and handle them asynchronously. Publish-subscribe patterns route messages from producers to multiple consumer processes, enabling decoupled event-driven architectures and flexible messaging topologies.

Yes. Erlang's supervision trees, links, and monitors provide fault tolerance by isolating failures to individual processes and restarting them automatically. This model scales from single-node BEAM applications to distributed systems with automatic recovery.

Erlang supports parallel maps, fork-join workflows, pipelines, and publish-subscribe patterns. These patterns leverage process spawning, selective receive, and message routing to coordinate work across isolated processes efficiently.

No. Erlang's process model teaches you the actor pattern through hands-on spawning, message passing, and fault handling. Basic familiarity with functional programming helps, but the Skill covers process creation and asynchronous communication from the ground up.