Broadly agree with the author's points, except for this one:
> TypeScript/Node.js: Better concurrency story thanks to the event loop, but still fundamentally single-threaded. Worker threads exist but they're heavyweight OS threads, not 2KB processes. There's no preemptive scheduling: one CPU-bound operation blocks everything.
This cannot be a real protest: 100% of the time spent in agent frameworks is spent ... waiting for the agent to respond, or waiting for a tool call to execute. Almost no time is spent in the logic of the framework itself.
Even if you use heavyweight OS threads, I just don't believe this matters.
Now, the other points about hot code swapping ... so true, painfully obvious to those of us who have used Elixir or Erlang.
For instance, OpenClaw: how much easier would "in-place updating" be if the language runtime was just designed with the ability in mind in the first place.
Erlang didn't introduce the actor model, any more than Java introduced garbage collection. That model was developed by Hewitt et al. in the 70s, and the Scheme language was developed to investigate it (core insights: actors and lambdas boil down to essentially the same thing, you really don't need much language to support some really abstract concepts).
Erlang was a fantastic implementation of the actor model for an industrial application, and probably proved out the model's utility for large-scale "real" work more than anything else. That and it being fairly semantically close to Scheme are why I like it.
The team that built Erlang (Joe, Robert, Mike, and Bjorn) didn't know the actor model was actually a thing. They wanted to build reliable distributed systems and came up with the isolated processes model you find in Erlang today. Eventually (probably when Erlang was open sourced?), folks connected the dots that the actor model was the most accurate description of what was going on!
> TypeScript/Node.js: Better concurrency story thanks to the event loop, but still fundamentally single-threaded. Worker threads exist but they're heavyweight OS threads, not 2KB processes. There's no preemptive scheduling: one CPU-bound operation blocks everything.
This cannot be a real protest: 100% of the time spent in agent frameworks is spent ... waiting for the agent to respond, or waiting for a tool call to execute. Almost no time is spent in the logic of the framework itself.
Even if you use heavyweight OS threads, I just don't believe this matters.
Now, the other points about hot code swapping ... so true, painfully obvious to those of us who have used Elixir or Erlang.
For instance, OpenClaw: how much easier would "in-place updating" be if the language runtime was just designed with the ability in mind in the first place.
Erlang didn't introduce the actor model, any more than Java introduced garbage collection. That model was developed by Hewitt et al. in the 70s, and the Scheme language was developed to investigate it (core insights: actors and lambdas boil down to essentially the same thing, you really don't need much language to support some really abstract concepts).
Erlang was a fantastic implementation of the actor model for an industrial application, and probably proved out the model's utility for large-scale "real" work more than anything else. That and it being fairly semantically close to Scheme are why I like it.