Nearly nobody mentions process isolation. Without guarantees of "your thread cannot mess with my junk", distributed systems are much more difficult to reason about. (They're already difficult enough with Erlang's processes.)
AFAIK (which isn't far, given my limited direct experience with the JVM), only Erlang actually gets process isolation "right" on the JVM. Mr. Google can give some hints on where to find research by Fox and Candea (?) on research systems that use a "micro-reboot" technique ("recovery-oriented computing"). An Erlang developer reads that research and says a couple of things:
- Welcome to the club, what took you so long?
- The JVM makes it awfully, awfully hard to join, though. :-)
