The grand design of BEAM is that you are copying data rather than passing it by reference. A copy operation severs a data dependency by design. Once the copy is handed somewhere, that part can operate in isolation. And modern computers are far better at copying data around than what people think. The exception are big-blocks-of-data(tm), but binaries are read-only in BEAM and thus not copied.
Sure, if you set up a problem which requires a ton of communication, then this model suffers. But so does your GPU if you do the same thing.
As Joe Armstrong said: our webserver is a thousand small webservers, each serving one request.
Virtually none of them have to communicate with each other.
The grand design of BEAM is that you are copying data rather than passing it by reference. A copy operation severs a data dependency by design. Once the copy is handed somewhere, that part can operate in isolation. And modern computers are far better at copying data around than what people think. The exception are big-blocks-of-data(tm), but binaries are read-only in BEAM and thus not copied.
Sure, if you set up a problem which requires a ton of communication, then this model suffers. But so does your GPU if you do the same thing.
As Joe Armstrong said: our webserver is a thousand small webservers, each serving one request.
Virtually none of them have to communicate with each other.