[ramchip]

Idiomatic Erlang involves handling only errors that are expected (read: part of the program’s specification), and crashing on any other kind of error. This keeps the error handling out of the business logic and makes the app code simpler and more reliable.

For instance, you can’t forget to close a socket, release a lock, or log the actor state and stacktrace, since these things are handled by the VM and supervisors when an actor dies. These are nice properties to have even in a single-node system if you’re aiming for high reliability.

I do agree though that a supervision tree doesn’t make as much sense in Go, since the VM does not provide the cleanup guarantees and strong process isolation that make the Erlang model really workable.