Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, Carl Hewitt

Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by haspok on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @10:34AM (#19208603)

"You end up with a big graph of actors" - you are almost certainly doing something wrong, the actor graph shouldn't need to be "big", and the supervisor hierarchy almost never deeper than 2-3 levels. A typical mistake when doing actor-based system design is to think that actors are replacements for modules or classes (or taken to the extreme: function calls), which is not the case.

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Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by carlehewitt on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @01:06PM (#19210240)

Massive Inconsistency Robust Ontologies will have trillions of Actors on a many-core computer.

Please see the YouTube video here:

  http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/190123.html

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Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by b3orn on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @05:29PM (#19212720)

Didn't watch the video, but as I understand actors is that you can have trillions of instances of your actors, but you're not having a large number of actually different actors. For example let's say you have a server that handles requests. You implement the request handler as an actor and for every request you spawn an instance of that actor to handle that request.

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Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by carlehewitt on Thursday February 21, 2019 @11:07AM (#19217755)

There will be zillions of different kinds of Actor in a massive inconsistency robust ontology, each with a different implementation although constructed on a common system.

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Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by chongli on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:45PM (#19209969)

According to Carl Hewitt, the actor model is based on physics (especially quantum physics). Doesn't this then imply that the natural scope of such a system entails huge numbers of actors, interacting in a probabilistic way?

So in order to understand our systems with huge graphs of actors, we should attempt to develop something akin to the heat equation for actors. Trying to understand the behaviour of every individual actor in the context of the whole system is just too much.

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Re:Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Ar... by mruts on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @02:03PM (#19210883)

I will admit that I do not have much experience creating actor systems. But the actor model in inherently complex. To be fair, that's because it's trying to solve a complex problem. But unless you actually need thousands of concurrent processes, often you can do without it.

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