Elixir’s lightweight processes are also a good fit. Though I’ve seen some benchmarks that claim that goroutines can hit even lower overhead per connection.
That makes sense, Erlang/Elixir processes are a much higher-level construct than goroutines, and they trade off performance for fault tolerance and observability.
As an example, with a goroutine you have to be careful to handle all errors, because a panic would take down the whole service. In Elixir a websocket handler can crash anywhere without impacting the application. This comes at a cost, because to make this safe Elixir has to isolate the processes so they don't share memory, so each process has its own individual heap, and data gets copied around more often than in Go.
As an example, with a goroutine you have to be careful to handle all errors, because a panic would take down the whole service. In Elixir a websocket handler can crash anywhere without impacting the application. This comes at a cost, because to make this safe Elixir has to isolate the processes so they don't share memory, so each process has its own individual heap, and data gets copied around more often than in Go.