[swift-evolution] Async vs Actor

Benjamin Garrigues bg at simpleapp.fr
Thu Aug 24 04:15:46 CDT 2017


Hi, not a compiler developer in any way, but i recently had the opportunity
to experiment with this pattern in go (thanks to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCbon_9yGVs).

It seems by reading the threads that the idea of mixing actor with async,
or actor with callbacks raises a lot of question related to the order in
which the instructions should be called.
Since actor seems to me like a way to reduce threading complexity (so it
should be a "no brainer" as to what to was in which order), and are cheap,
wouldn't a "solution' to simply say :

"execute an async call from an actor is done by spawning another actor,
sending the request to it, having it execute the request in a blocking
manner (but in its own thread/coroutine) then wait for his response message
as a regular call from actor to actor" ?

Now maybe one could say that "async" is just a shortcut for doing all this.
But i thought this was a simple way to think about it.

Just to my 2 cents.
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