Table of Contents
What is the actor model good for?
Use of actors allows us to: Enforce encapsulation without resorting to locks. Use the model of cooperative entities reacting to signals, changing state, and sending signals to each other to drive the whole application forward. Stop worrying about an executing mechanism which is a mismatch to our world view.
What is actor model concurrency?
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats actor as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. Actors may modify their own private state, but can only affect each other indirectly through messaging (removing the need for lock-based synchronization).
How does Akka handle concurrency?
Akka’s approach to handling concurrency is based on the Actor Model. More specifically, in a Scala actor system, actors interact and share information, without any presupposition of sequentiality. The mechanism by which actors share information with one another, and task one another, is message passing.
Why is actor model not popular?
The popularization of the actor model was partly due to weakening of Moore’s Law. Processors were not becoming faster anymore so we needed to use multiple cores and start writing parallel software… or at least so it seemed.
What is the difference between actor and model?
It is entirely different profession, which requires different skills. Models are trained for posing, it’s extensive training that teaches them to keep the best postures, mimic and move. It’s all about the momentum. Acting is a long run.
Is Scala good for concurrency?
Scala got a fame for being good for concurrency because it is a functional language and because of its actors library. Functional languages are good for concurrency because they focus on immutability, which helps concurrent algorithms.
Who uses Akka in production?
Lightbend note Of our 50 case studies and community stories, 39 of them (78\%) are using Akka in production–happy clients include Walmart, Hootsuite, Huffington Post, WhitePages, Gilt, and Ticketfly.
What is the difference between actor-based and thread-based concurrency?
The actor model for concurrency is very different than thread-based concurrency with locks or STM. Isolated mutable state and asynchronous messaging yield other programming patterns that threads do. First of all, it is important to understand that actors represent very lightweight primitives compared to threads.
What programming languages use the actor model for concurrency?
The first, fairly popular programming language that has incorporated the actor model for concurrency was Erlang [Vin07]. The actor model has recently become increasingly popular and finds its way into many new programming languages, often as first-class language concept.
Is the Erlang actor model parallel?
The actor model is inherently parallel, thus it is very easy to extend implementations of the actor model to support distributed deployments. For instance, distributed Erlang systems make use of multiple nodes running an Erlang virtual machine and transparently provide distributed messages passing.