> This allows multithreaded garbage collection without stop-the-world pauses.
This was one of the things that really floored me when I learned about how BEAM was designed. It's incredible that how all the seemingly small changes come together in a way that works really well for the problem domains Erlang was used for.
Anyone interested in this subject would be extremely well-served by picking up a copy of the late, great Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang." Putting together a minimal "server" and then slowly evolving it into a GenServer is incredibly fun and rewarding. And then the kicker is you get hot-swapping for (almost) free! Learning about Erlang hot-swapping was probably one of my most favorite moments in my brief time using Erlang before moving onto Elixir, where you get it all right out of the box.
This was one of the things that really floored me when I learned about how BEAM was designed. It's incredible that how all the seemingly small changes come together in a way that works really well for the problem domains Erlang was used for.