Question

I read a chapter in a book (Seven languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate) about Matz (Inventor of Ruby) saying that ‘I would remove the thread and add actors, or some other more advanced concurrency features’.

• Why and how an actor model can be an advanced concurrency model that replaces the threading?
• What other models are the ‘advanced concurrency model’?

Answer 1

It’s not so much that the actor model will replace threads; at the level of the cpu, processes will still have multiple threads which are scheduled and run on the processor cores. The idea of actors is to replace this underlying complexity with a model which, its proponents argue, makes it easier for programmers to write reliable code.

The idea of actors is to have separate threads of control (processes in Erlang parlance) which communicate exclusively by message passing. A more traditional programming model would be to share memory, and coordinate communication between threads using mutexes. This still happens under the surface in the actor model, but the details are abstracted away, and the programmer is given reliable primitives based on message passing.

One important point is that actors do not necessarily map 1-1 to threads — in the case of Erlang, they definitely don’t — there would normally be many Erlang processes per kernel thread. So there has to be a scheduler which assigns actors to threads, and this detail is also abstracted away from the application programmer.

If you’re interested in the actor model, you might want to take look at the way it works in Erlang or Scala.

If you’re interested in other types of new concurrency hotness, you might want to look at software transactional memory, a different approach that can be found in clojure and haskell.

It bears mentioning that many of the more aggressive attempts at creating advanced concurrency models appear to be happening in functional languages. Possibly due to the belief (I drink some of this kool-aid myself) that immutability makes concurrency much easier.