It's Actors All The Way Down

The “Sleeping Barber” problem is another classic concurrency example. As with our previous discussion of “Dining Philosophers”, actors allow a novel approaching to solving this problem. We will adjust a few of the details to enhance the metaphor and have a bit of fun with it. Our metaphorical barber provides yak shaving services. Yaks arrive […]

In the Actor Model, concurrency is the default. Sequencing must by arranged explicitly. An important case of sequencing occurs when there is a data dependency between different parts of a system. One part produces a value that another part needs to perform its function. One mechanism for sequencing data-dependent operations is to create a Future. […]

The “Dining Philosophers” problem is a classic example used to illustrate various challenges with concurrency. We will approach this problem by incrementally designing the actors which model the problem and its solution in Humus. Through this example we will explore the avoidance of deadlock and starvation in the design of actor-based systems. Basic Thinking/Eating Cycle […]

In his article about state management in Clojure, Rich Hickey discusses his reasons for choosing not to use the Erlang-style actor model. While Erlang has made some implementation choices that can lead to problems, the problems are not intrinsic to the Actor Model. As the actor implementation with the longest history of success, Erlang naturally […]