alt Hacker NewsParaphrasing the late great Joe Armstrong, the great thing about Erlang as opposed to just about any other language is that every year the same program gets twice as fast as last year.
Manycores hasn't succeeded because frankly the programming model of essentially every other language is stuck in 1950. I, the program, am the entire and sole thing running on this computer, and must manually manage resources to match its capabilities. Hence async/await, mutable memory, race checkers, function coloring, all that nonsense. If half the effort spent straining to get the ghost PDP-11 ruling all the programming languages had been spent on cleaning up the (several) warts in the actor model and its few implementations, we'd all be driving Waymos on Jupiter by now.
Replies
Can you explain the joe armstrong quote a bit to someone not familiar with the language?
I'm curious, which actor model warts are you referring to exactly?
[The obvious candidates from my point of view are (1) it's an abstract mathematical model with dispersed application/implementations, most of which introduce additional constraints (in other words, there is no central theory of the actor model implementation space), and (2) the message transport semantics are fixed: the model assumes eventual out-of-order delivery of an unbounded stream of messages. I think they should have enumerated the space of transport capabilities including ordered/unordered, reliable/unreliable within the core model. Treatment of bounded queuing in the core model would also be nice, but you can model that as an unreliable intermediate actor that drops messages or implements a backpressure handshake when the queue is full.]