Comment by brightball

The BEAM is very lightweight and necessary within Erlang to enforce one of its greatest tradeoffs:

- No universal garbage collector, every process (aka green thread) has its own heap that is reclaimed when it dies.

- No process can takeover the CPU. If you run a hugely intensive task in one process, everything else, millions of other processes potentially, will continue responding normally and consistently. The hugely intensive task will just take longer.

There’s more that applies to some advanced use cases, but these are the 2 core elements that are awesome.