How does shared memory vs message passing handle large data structures?

Question

In looking at Go and Erlang\'s approach to concurrency, I noticed that they both rely on message passing.

This approach obviously alleviates the need for complex loc

Answer 1

Usually message passing languages (this is especially easy in erlang, since it has immutable variables) optimise away the actual data copying between the processes (of course local processes only: you'll want to think your network distribution pattern wisely), so this isn't much an issue.