I've read up on Pony [1] and realized that it currently has a
superior implementation of the actor model when it comes to
combining safety, efficiency and memory management determinism
(thread-local reference-counting GC with consensus guarantees)
What libraries do we have at our disposal in D (including
code.dlang.org) for implementing task-based parallelism that is
close to Pony's solution with regards to
1. @safely sending isolated (transitively unique reference to)
messages between actors (tasks) without the need for copying.
Vibe.d has, for instance, `makeIsolated` [2] that serves this
purpose.
2. a task-scheduler that can move blocked tasks between threads.
Yes, I know, this has been discussed many times before...I'm
checking to see if there are any updates.
3. could we make such a solution GC-free by requiring immutable
data inside isolated messages to be unique references (not
currently implicitly shared) aswell using, for instance,
https://dlang.org/library/std/typecons/unique.html. I'm thinking
of a trait named something like `makeIsolatedUnshared` that
checks these restrictions.
[1] https://www.ponylang.org/
[2] http://vibed.org/api/vibe.core.concurrency/makeIsolated
What assistance can/could we currently/in-the-future get from D's
type-system to verify correctness of these paradigms?
