Sure, I wasn't saying not to use Erlang. Just saying that it is very possible to use threads and pointers in a sane (and Erlang-style) way.

I am a big fan of interpreted languages and use them as my default. The situation I was describing was basically the only time I've ever rewritten in C++ for speed! It just doesn't happen that often.

But I do wish the interpreted languages like Python, node.js, and Erlang all had better and more consistent C APIs (more like Lua's). C itself is not that hard, but the C APIs definitely put people off.

Actually I wonder for Erlang, with the web crawler example, would you have to copy entire web pages if you wanted to pass them off from a "network actor" to a "parsing actor"? The threads + pointers solution easily avoids that, while retaining modularity.