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eaurougetoday at 10:30 AM2 repliesview on HN

Nurseries sound similar to run-till-completion schedulers [0].

> IMO the urge to use both the actor model (and its relative, CSP) in non-distributed systems solely in order to achieve concurrency has been a massive boondoggle

Can't you model any concurrent non-distributed system as a concurrent distributed system?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-to-completion_scheduling


Replies

kibwentoday at 12:50 PM

> Can't you model any concurrent non-distributed system as a concurrent distributed system?

Yes, in the same way that you can give up `for` loops and `while` loops and `if` statements and `switch` statements and instead write them all with `goto`, but you don't do this, and anyone advising you to do this would be written off as insane. The entire thrust of this thread is that you can have a more reliable system that is easier to reason about if you use specific constructs that each have less power, and non-distributed systems have the option to do this. Unstructured concurrency should be reserved exclusively for contexts where structured concurrency is impossible, which is what the actor model is for.

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ahokatoday at 12:54 PM

You can certainly make any simple problem complicated enough to need a complex solution. But that’s just bad engineering.