On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 18:19:51 UTC, Jim Hewes wrote:
I've recently become curious about the actor model and would
like to learn more about it and maybe play around with it a
bit. The C++ Actor Framework looks good, but unfortunately it
doesn't yet work with MSVC so I'm waiting for that.
Yes, there are libraries, but for it to be pleasant I think
language support is needed. I've linked to this video before, but
it is quite entertaining if you haven't seen it yet:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Hewitt-Meijer-and-Szyperski-The-Actor-Model-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask
Carl Hewitt stresses the difference from other concurrency models
that use non-determinism by pointing out that a key quality with
actor based systems is indeterminism. (i.e. that things may
simply evaporate without notice).
Wikipedia has a rather lengthy page on Actors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
I read a comment* on stack overflow that mentions that the
important component is actually environment/platform such as
OTP is for Erlang.
I'm not sure how this affects the C++ actor implementations.
I don't know much about C++ actor frame works, but if you only
want to play with actors then you could give pony-lang.org a
spin. Not sure if they really focus on indeterminism, though.
But an interesting property of using actors is that you (in
theory) could scale up by migrating actors to other compute
nodes. Or run programs on many core CPUs and just keep going even
if one core crashes. If indeterminism is assumed then you have to
design for unstable communication between actors with more
robustness as an outcome (hopefully).
