[swift-evolution] [Concurrency] choice of actor model

[Shams Imam]

Do you have example communication patterns for the actor model/asynchronous
messaging context? It would be interesting to see if selectors could be
used to simplify programming such patterns.

Regards,
Shams.

On Sat, Aug 19, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Jonathan Hull <jhull at gbis.com> wrote:

> The issue of a lack of ordering is one that actually comes up a lot in
> Swift, and we don’t have a good answer for it in general.  That might be
> something we want to take a deeper look at in the Swift 5 timeframe (at
> least to talk about options).  It would help more than just concurrency…
>
> Thanks,
> Jon
>
>
> On Aug 18, 2017, at 8:51 PM, Shams Imam via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>
> Disclaimer: this was work done during my graduate study. It was presented
> in front of an audience that included Gul Agha who appreciated the work.
>
> The Actor model is great concurrency model to build on top of thanks to
> its data isolation and asynchronous message processing properties. However,
> lack of guarantees to control the order in which messages are processed by
> an actor makes implementing synchronization and coordination patterns
> difficult in the Actor model. Solutions to support such order in processing
> constraints may require the actor to buffer messages and resend the
> messages to itself until the message is processed. The resulting code is a
> petri-dish of code that intertwines both algorithmic logic and
> synchronization constraints.
>
> I would encourage you to look into the Selector model which is an
> extension of the Actor model that allows an actor to have multiple
> mailboxes. These mailboxes can be enabled/disabled to control which message
> is processed next by the selector (in many ways this is similar to a select
> operation among multiple channels in Communicating Sequential Processes
> style programs). Enabling/disabling does not affect which messages are
> accepted at a mailbox.
>
> In essence, an actor is a selector with a single mailbox which is always
> enabled. Selectors simplify writing of synchronization and coordination
> patterns using actors such as:
>
> a) 'synchronous' request-reply,
> b) join patterns in streaming applications,
> c) supporting priorities in message processing,
> d) variants of reader-writer concurrency, and
> e) producer-consumer with bounded buffer.
>
> Relevant links:
> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2687360
> Detailed description: https://shamsimam.github.io/papers/2014-agere-
> selector.pdf
> Slides: https://shamsimam.github.io/papers/2014-agere-selector-slides.pdf
>
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170819/39636253/attachment.html>