Actor Model

A really brief introduction to Actor Model

Transcript

1. Actor
2. History
3. Inspired by physics including general relativity and quantum mechanics
4. Also influenced by • Lisp • Simula • Early versions of Smalltalk • Capability-based systems • Packet switching
5. Design for quantity of microprocessors
6. Fundamental concepts
7. Everything is an actor Like OO
8. Actor model is inherently concurrent.
9. Communicate by sharing state
10. Share state by communicating
11. Actor send/receive messages
12. Response to message • Send a finite number of messages to other actors • Create a finite number of new actors • Designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives.
13. When to use
14. • You can decompose your problem into a set of independent tasks linked by a clear workflow • You want to be able to cancel jobs • You want to scale across threads and cores • You have a complex system that involves dependencies and shared state • You want to avoid the usage of explicit locks to protect shared state and actually make copies of that state (messages) and reacting to them locally • You want to code components that are intrinsically thread safe
15. Implementations
16. Erlang/Elixir |ˈɜrlæŋ| |ɪˈlɪksɪə(r)|
17. Ruby
18. Objective-C
19. References • http://www.theerlangelist.com/2013/01/actors-in-erlangelixir.html?m=1 • http://learnyousomeerlang.com/starting-out-for-real • http://www.erlang.org/faq/getting_started.html#id51475 • http://savanne.be/articles/concurrency-in-erlang-scala/ • http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/erlang/ • http://www.theerlangelist.com/2013/01/actors-in-erlangelixir.html?m=1 • http://media.pragprog.com/titles/elixir/ElixirCheat.pdf • http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html
20. References (continue) • https://github.com/celluloid/celluloid/wiki • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model • http://albertodebortoli.github.io/blog/2014/05/20/ asynchronous-message-passing-with-actors-in- objective-c
21. Thanks