Go vs Elixir: A concurrency comparison
summary
Direct comparison of concurrency models: actor model (Elixir/Erlang on the BEAM) uses millions of isolated processes with mailboxes, asynchronous messaging, supervisors for “let it crash” fault tolerance and preemptive scheduling; CSP (Go) uses goroutines plus typed channels, synchronous sends, select for choice, buffered channels (example used a buffer of 16) and cooperative scheduling that can block the program. Demonstrations include a Go “gen_server” style counter (worked but felt awkward) and an Elixir-backed channel queue; Go programs compile to ~2MB binaries vs ~20MB for a minimal Elixir release.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction to speakers
- 1:32Defining concurrency
- 3:56Concurrency vs parallelism
- 6:14Challenges with threads
- 9:37The Actor Model in Elixir
- 14:40CSP in Go
- 17:48Implementing Go routines
- 21:34Using select in Go
- 24:54Go's implementation details
- 27:16Go programming rationale
- 29:48Comparing models
- 32:04Bridging model gaps
- 33:21Implementing GenServer in Go
- 39:00Conclusions and Q&A
