This is part two of an article exploring what we mean when we say “message-passing”. Part one described how synchronous rendezvous can be expressed with actors. Part two describes an actor implementation of object-oriented method invocation. For Object-Oriented developers from the Smalltalk tradition, message-passing involves a dynamic method lookup, invocation of that method with the […]

What do we mean when we say “message-passing”. For Object-Oriented developers from the Smalltalk tradition, message-passing involves a dynamic method lookup, invocation of that method with the target object as an implicit parameter, and return of a result object. By contrast, message-passing in synchronous communication models (such as Ï€-calculus) involves “rendezvous” between sender and receiver, […]