[swift-evolution] Swift and actors

[Roope Kangas]

2017-10-03 15:45 GMT+03:00 Marc Schlichte via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org>:

> The Actor paradigm is widely used in the telecommunications industry. You
> might want to have a look at SDL (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/
> wiki/Specification_and_Description_Language) with its processes similar
> to Actors.
>
> Btw Erlang with its early actor support started in the telecommunications
> industry too.
>
> An advantage of the proposed actor design for Swift (and also present in
> Microsoft Orleans) over Akka and others is the use of value returning async
> actor methods which allow for a more procedural programming style  - as
> opposed to a pure message passing style which is indeed harder to follow /
> debug.




Might be a bit of an sidetrack but...

Yes, well in Erlang systems you have immutable state. When you receive a
message you return a new state from the function handling it, or just crash
and let the system log your state and the message that caused the this.

That makes it a bit easier to understand where things can change than for
example some other systems I have worked with.

When I have written these Actor based programs, I have preferred to keep
the messaging asynchronous. There I personally do not see a value of
keeping around so called Futures and doing bookkeeping. And have had even
less use for blocking calls to other actors (wait for response).

My main use case has been game servers where I have clear actor like
things: a clan, player, or an tcp connection.

But yes, you still need tools to sometimes debug the system. While
developing a unit testing framework with ability to start actors and easily
pass message to them can go a long way.

Roope


>
> Cheers
> Marc
>
>   Ursprüngliche Nachricht
> Von: swift-evolution at swift.org
> Gesendet: 2. Oktober 2017 11:59 vorm.
> An: swift-evolution at swift.org
> Antworten: gerard_iglesias at me.com
> Betreff: [swift-evolution] Swift and actors
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> Sadly I don’t have the time to participate on all the so interesting
> discussion about concurrency and actor stuff.
>
> But I have a question.
>
> I am working for 6 months in the Scala/Akka world, on a project (server
> stuff in a docker kubernates world) and after six months of work, and talk
> with Scala experts we are abandoning the actor paradigm. It is true that
> quickly the code is hard to follow, maybe our fault but I have to say that
> it seems me that the nature itself of the actor system bring some opaque
> way to follow what happen in the system. Even for a small set of actors.
>
> It has been very fun to try an architecture based on Actors, but at the
> end, this is not easy to see what use case they are good for.
>
> Then I wonder if we/you have good use case where Actor paradigm can show
> real advantages ?
>
> Something obvious to me that the dev tools would need to be very advanced
> for debugging in case of actor model use.
>
> Cheers
>
> Gerard
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20171003/a48b0dd2/attachment.html>