So, if you want this inflexible model, you could easily build it as a library in Erlang, just as you're clearly using someone's inflexible fork-join model library (or an inflexible language implementation); in the mean time you're missing out on things like fork A, B, C, A expected to run much longer than the other two, when B and C return, fork D using the results from B and C , finally wait for A and D to return. Or fork A, B, C and merge the first two that return, then merge that one and the third. Or fork these ten jobs, but only run four of them at any given time (resource constraints). My first example you could probably structure into your model with an extra fork; the second example won't fit in your model, the third fits if you fork four workers and add a shared queuing mechanism, but that feels more complex.

These kind of techniques are key to using parallelism to reduce latency. Always having to wait for everyone to finish at each step makes for a lot of waiting.

Fork-join is not what you think it is then. It's just a behavior, uncommon outside of the shared memory programming. And there is no order of results. There can be, if it is implemented on top of message passing. But then writing code that relies on order instead of specific names actually becomes error prone.

And lack of order of messages is still not a race condition.