Hi David, I've actually read quite a bit of your actor-related material and I'm aware of your criticisms. I respect the fact that your opinion has grown out of experience, rather than just thought-experiments. However, my own experimentation has led me to different conclusions.
To be clear, the context of my exploration has been what I call actors-in-the-small rather than actors-in-the-large. While the issues of multi-core shared-memory-multiprocessing significantly overlap the issues of open distributed systems, certain problems (like message loss) are less important, and other problems (like latency) are more important for actors-in-the-small. When I say that the actor model is flexible enough to model the mechanisms of other computational models, I _do not_ mean simply in the "Turing tar-pit" sense. For me, the actor model places the emphasis on message protocols and behavior, rather than mutable state and global consistency. In that sense, I find that describing other computational models with actors helps me to understand the event interactions that are hidden within the primitives of each model. This leads me to a better understand of how each mechanism works, and provides a basis for comparison between models. I will be publishing further articles illustrating exactly what I mean by this. Thanks for your thoughtful response. I look forward to continued productive debate on these fascinating subjects. Dale _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
