[mikhailfranco]

Races and deadlocks are certainly possible in pure Erlang/Elixir - no databases or global state required. There is no magic bullet.

For example, if you use blocking RPCs between two processes, they can deadlock waiting for each other's responses. Try implementing Dining Philosophers, you will learn a lot.

The answer is not to use blocking RPC, but that will challenge your brain topology. It takes some time to be able to lower yourself into the hot bath of full asynchrony, but when you do, it feels very very good.

I characterize it as the co-problem (in the sense of the dual of a problem). Distributing a problem, starting processes and pushing messages is easy. But it may be hard to know when you're finished. Everything is easy, but termination is difficult. It's the Erlang/Elixir Halting Problem.

It is not often mentioned as a strong feature for concurrent programming, but Erlang/Elixir have timeouts built into the language. And when you add OTP supervisor restarts, you can avoid some common programming mistakes through random evasion - don't do this by design, but it does help resilience.