Process and Mailbox

Process and Mailbox

An actor in Hamler/Erlang is defined as a process, which works like an OS process. Each process has its own memory, composed of a mailbox, a heap, a stack and a process control block(PCB) with information about the process.

Processes in Erlang are very lightweight. We can create millions of processes on a running Erlang virtual machine.

A process is identified by a Pid. Other processes can send messages to a process via Pid.