The Concurrency Problem
What's broken, what almost worked, and what a real fix might look like
- 1 Message Passing Is Shared Mutable State published
- 2 The Isolation Trap published
- 3 What Async Promised and What It Delivered
- 4 Dataflow, FRP, and STM
- 5 Rust and Ownership
- 6 A Unifying Theory
- 7 What Should Concurrency Look Like?
Latest
March 9, 2026
The Isolation Trap
What Erlang shows about the limits of concurrency through isolation
Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.