Tell HN: Lois - Golang like channels for Java

Re:Tell HN: Lois - Golang like channels for Java by rakoo on Monday April 14, 2014 @07:45AM (#7585610)

Channels live at a lower level. Usually when you create a channel you share it between multiple goroutines: It acts exactly like a pipe, and are transparent to what's inside. Moreover, goroutines sending to and receiving from a channel don't know (and don't need to know) what's on the other end.

Actors are more like a combination of a channel and a goroutine: when you send something to the actor, you know what the other end is and you know what it does with messages.

Actors induce a certain paradigm for your application, and I believe Go just wants to give you the tool to build whatever you want. Having channels allows using the Actor paradigm, the other way is not as easy/lightweight.

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Re:Tell HN: Lois - Golang like channels for Java by rubiquity on Monday April 14, 2014 @10:20AM (#7586287)

> Actors are more like a combination of a channel and a goroutine: when you send something to the actor, you know what the other end is and you know what it does with messages.

I don't think this is the case at all. When sending a message to an address you don't know how many actors are behind that address, and even further you don't know how many addresses an actor has. Actors and addresses have a many-to-many relationship.

I think the power of the Actor model is essentially putting your faith in the system and not caring about when messages get handled, or what order they get handled in - it's just knowing that the message will get handled.

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