[dumael]

You can at best implement a mimicry of Erlang's message passing in Java.

With sufficient effort, you can have the equivalent of no shared mutable data.

What you cannot have is completely separate heaps, so that if one thread crashes for whatever reason it doesn't take your application down.

Also, good luck trying to find a garbage collector that supports completely separate heaps that isn't a direct copy/near-identical implementation of the BEAM[1] VM's GC.

[1] The virtual machine that is the stock VM for Erlang. (In fact I don't know of any others but I have never looked.)

[reeses]

We've been doing it in Java since the nasty old days of RMI or "our own weird RPC over HTTP implementation". Lots of lightweight services with a supervisor to manage them and a directory to find them.

Now it's even easier with ESBs. Write a ten-line grails service to expose a bin-packing facility with Drools and then never touch it again.