@janl I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree that full isolation has issues, but I disagree that untyped messages are bad and that Akka is bad because it's embedded in Java. In Akka's case, the value of being embedded in an existing language more than outweighs the drawbacks, imo, and the author shows how relaxing isolation has all sorts of benefits so I would have expected Akka to compare more favorably in the end. The killer feature of shared memory that goes unmentioned is the ability to use immutable persistent data structures that share structure rather than copying (for actors in the same OS process). The deadlock scenario in Erlang is indeed bad, though. If Erlang had promises like JS then A -> B -> A would not deadlock.