alt Hacker NewsI'm working on an rest API server backed by a git repo. Having an actor responsible for all git operations saved me from a lot of trouble as having all git operations serialised freed me from having to prevent concurrent git operations.
Using actors also simplified greatly other parts of the app.
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koakuma-chan • today at 7:02 AM
So you're just using actors to limit concurrency? Why not use a mutex?
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Isn’t that just serializing through a queue, aka. the producer consumer pattern? Which I think the correct solution for most common concurrency problems.
For something to be an actor, it should be able to:
- Send and receive messages
- Create other actors
- Change how the next message is handled (becomes in Erlang)
I think the last one is what makes it different it from simple message passing, and what makes it genius: state machines consuming queues.