alt Hacker NewsIsn’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.
Agreed, (heirarchical if you must) state machines consuming queues and writing to queues via messages wins. If you are FP minded like me, then you are set up to cleanly separate IO to the edges and have a functional core imperative shell hexagonal architecture for less additional overhead thsn a standard java beans style OO logical design.