[erlang-questions] Ideas for a new Erlang

[Matthew Reilly]

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>
>
>  I hope that we can rely on Erlang garbage collection to
> collect any process suspended in a receive construct and not registered
> and not referenced by any other process.  If we can, the distinction is
> only useful to people and not really needed by the computer.
>   

This will doubtfully ever happen. Since erlang is distributed, a pid may 
be referenced via a process on a completely different node, so any 
garbage collection of pids would therefore need to be distributed. 
Adding on to this term_to_binary,  mnesia, ... pids could be stored in 
different formats or even on disk.

You also may wish to have pids that are unreferenced by any other, but 
still do important work e.g.

loop() ->
    after 1000 ->
       % Touch the hardware watchdog to prevent the system from reboooting
       file:read_file("/dev/watchdog"),
       ?MODULE:loop()
end