Today I’m going to talk about the actor model. I’ll first put the model in context, and then show three different styles of actor language, includ

History of Actors (eighty-twenty news)

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2021-07-04 21:30:07

Today I’m going to talk about the actor model. I’ll first put the model in context, and then show three different styles of actor language, including two that aim to be realistic programming systems.

2016 survey by Joeri De Koster, Tom Van Cutsem, and Wolfgang De Meuter, for taxonomy and common terminology (SPLASH AGERE 2016)

brief mention of some of the content of the original 1973 paper by Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger. (IJCAI 1973)

In the model, each actor performs “turns” one after the other: a turn is taking a waiting message, interpreting it, and deciding on both a state update for the actor and a collection of actions to take in response, perhaps sending messages or creating new actors.

modular reasoning about state in the overall system, and modular reasoning about local state change within an actor, because state is private, and access is serialized; only have to consider interleavings of messages

no “deadlocks” or data races (though you can get “datalock” and other global non-progress in some circumstances, from logical inconsistency and otherwise)

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