On 10/8/2015 11:56 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 18:19:51 UTC, Jim Hewes wrote:
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
Yeah, I watched that after I saw your other post with the link. Thanks.
One early question that I have (that someone else also asked in a
comment below the video) is about design and the granularity of actors.
What sorts of things do you define as an actor? How big does an entity
need to be before you should make it an actor?
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).
Another thing I noted was when he said once you get to 1000 cores the
programmer knows nothing about the environment. So rather than figure
out new ways to manage these things like locks and threads, it makes
sense to get to a more abstract level where you don't even deal with it
at all anymore.
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.
Thanks! I'll give it a look. It's probably good for playing around with
to get a feel for it.
