An In-Depth Comparison of Concurrency in Go and Elixir

In this Elixir Melbourne Meetup talk, Julian delves into the world of concurrency, contrasting Go and Elixir. Julian, a senior staff engineer, provides insights into the low-level design goals and runtime operations that make Go and Elixir unique. Both languages are designed to handle concurrency but approach the problem differently. Go focuses on productivity and performance with a concurrency model based on goroutines and channels, whereas Elixir, which runs on the BEAM virtual machine, prioritizes fault tolerance and soft real-time capabilities with isolated processes and message passing. The talk examines Go's preemptive multitasking and garbage collection improvements while comparing them to BEAM’s process-based garbage collection. Julian also touches on the impact and practical implementation of concurrent tasks and error handling in both languages.