JEjerf·Sep 1, 2015
I've used both extensively. The practical differences between a goroutine and an Erlang process are small. The most significant difference is enforcement of isolation vs. isolation-by-convention (and bear in mind the latter is not the same as "no isolation"), but this is a bigger difference in theory than in fact.
OTP being missing matters less than you might initially think, too. I implement what bits of supervisor trees can be implemented here: https://github.com/thejerf/suture , and in general, with the way Go is structured, gen_servers and such just sort of melt away into "things you interact with over channels" without much fuss. (IMHO, OTP is generally a good thing, but the reification of gen_X so deeply into the language was an error. I actually prefer Go+Suture's way of bringing up a server; much simpler, virtually no loss of capa
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bility in practice. Again, the theoretical difference turns out to be larger than the practical difference.)
(And before someone angrily smashes the reply button, pleases meditate on the distinction between a "small difference" and "no difference", especially the subjective nature of such judgment calls. You can certainly quibble with the size I assign to the differences but please don't reply as if I claimed no difference, or as if I have not demonstrated awareness of the difference between a strictly-enforced no-sharing environment vs. unenforced no-sharing convention, and, likewise, let's not pretend "isolation by convention" is the same thing in practice as "traditional shared-memory threading". Memory sharing can bite you in Go, and while I've gotten pretty used to the necessary patterns to avoid that (spending years in Erlang first is really good training for that), I don't deny it is non-zero cognitive effort required.)