Linux is robust and fault tolerant by design. This comes at the cost of higher performance overhead, of course.
Besides, why are you comparing BEAM to a full-fledged OS kernel?
Besides, why are you comparing BEAM to a full-fledged OS kernel?
In fact in high integrity certified deployments, it is another actually robust and fault tolerant kernel running Linux kernel as yet another user process.
Kernels like INTEGRITY are robust and fault tolerant by design.
Edit: sorry, i see you're not the GP commenter.
How is Linux fault tolerant. Say a kernel driver starts overwriting kernel memory how do the rest of the kernel subsystems isolate that fault and keep going without crashing?
And what happens when a core module that is part of BEAM starts overwriting critical BEAM VM data structures?
A more apt comparison would be software running on top of BEAM vs. a userspace process running on top of Linux.
Agreed.
> And what happens when a core module that is part of BEAM starts overwriting critical BEAM VM data structures?
Segfaults and other terrible things.
> A more apt comparison would be software running on top of BEAM vs. a userspace process running on top of Linux.
That's a better analogy of course. I've heard of BEAM VM described as an "OS for application code". Nobody would want to put their latest and greatest crown jewel production code on a Windows 3.1 platform, where one segfault in the calculator process takes down the word processor, but that is essentially what is happening when using shared memory and concurrency units (threads, goroutines, co-routines, green threads etc).