Concurrency

Actor Model We’ll explore a concurrency model that makes writing performant, concurrent software much easier than traditional approaches. I’m talking about the Actor Model. In the following sections, we’ll dive into what it is and how it simplifies concurrency challenges that developers dread. History Actor model was introduced in 1973 by Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger of MIT in their paper “A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence”. The Artificial Intelligence being talked about is not the GenAI that we talk about but about computational systems in general. It was influenced by programming languages like Lisp, Simula, Smalltalk(which is still considered by many as one of the best Object Oriented Language implementation). ...

We talk about different concurrency models and although there are several, two of them standout for being easy to reason about and relatively bug free. Those are CSP(Communicating Sequential Processes) and Actor Model. In this article, we will talk about CSP and how it handles concurrency. Thread-based Concurrency Thread-based concurrency is the model that all programming languages usually implement. At its core it uses threads which are similar to OS level processes but share the memory, file and network resources of the parent process. Operating system schedules the threads and handles the multiplexing between the different threads. In this model, programming languages usually do not handle the scheduling of the threads. ...