Abstract

A major challenge in writing applications that execute across hosts, such as distributed online services, is to reconcile (a) parallelism (i.e., allowing components to execute independently on disjoint tasks), and (b)cooperation (i.e., allowing components to work together on common tasks). A good compromise between the two is vital to scalability, a core concern in distributed networked applications.
The actor model of computation is a widely promoted programming model for distributed applications, as actors can execute in individual threads (parallelism) across different hosts and interact via asynchronous message passing (collaboration). However, this makes it hard for programmers to reason about combinations of messages as opposed to individual messages, which is essential in many scenarios.
This paper presents a pragmatic variant of the actor model in which messages can be grouped into units that are …

Date

2020

Authors

Bo Sang, Patrick Eugster, Gustavo Petri, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman

Journal

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Volume

4

Issue

OOPSLA

Pages

1-30

Publisher

ACM