[erlang-questions] Why are messages between processes copied?

[Lukas Larsson]

Hello,

It makes garbage collection much easier and more predictable as the
heaps of each process then can be completely isolated. There have been
attempts to make a hybrid heap which would allows non copy message
passing, but afaik the attempts have been abandoned.

Lukas

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:22 PM, H. Diedrich <hd2010@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I had naively thought that Erlang would be sending process messages around
> profiting from the fact that data is immutable and NOT copying it. And
> really just send a 'pointer'.
>
> Why is that not so, it should be a huge gain from immutable data, especially
> with bigger data. You don't have to copy, knowing that your data is
> immutable.
>
> Thanks for a link or a brief,
> Henning
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