alt Hacker NewsI'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.]
I don't think either of those are particularly problematic. The actor model as implemented by Erlang is concrete and robust enough. The big problems with the actor model are, in my opinion, around (1) speed optimizations for immutable memory and message passing (currently, there's a great deal of copying and pointer chasing involved, which can be slow and is a ripe area for optimization), (2) (for Erlang) speed and QOL improvements for math and strings (Erlang historically is not about fast math or string handling, but both of those do comprise a great deal of general purpose programming), (3) (for Erlang) operational QOL misc improvements (e.g. existing distribution, ets, amnesia, failover, hot upgrade, node deployment, build process range from arcane (amnesia, hot upgrades, etc.all the way up to covered-in-terrifying-spiders (e.g. debugging queuing issues, rebar3))