Why Do Scala Developers Mix the Actor Model with other Concurrency Models?

Tasharofi, Samira; Dinges, Peter; Johnson, Ralph E.

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39038-8_13

Cited by 67 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Actor frameworks hosted by programming languages that allow sharing of state generally cannot ensure isolation of actors. At the same time, it gives developers access to a large set of well-tested special-purpose libraries that are unavailable in shielded actor frameworks [34]. An exception to this is Kilim [6] that ensures isolation of actors in Java applications using a bytecode postprocessor.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting actor programming in C++

Charousset

Hiesgen

Schmidt

2016

Computer Languages, Systems & Structures

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The actor model of computation has gained significant popularity over the last decade. Its high level of abstraction makes it appealing for concurrent applications in parallel and distributed systems. However, designing a real-world actor framework that subsumes full scalability, strong reliability, and high resource efficiency requires many conceptual and algorithmic additives to the original model.In this paper, we report on designing and building CAF, the "C++ Actor Framework". CAF targets at providing a concurrent and distributed native environment for scaling up to very large, highperformance applications, and equally well down to small constrained systems. We present the key specifications and design concepts-in particular a message-transparent architecture, type-safe message interfaces, and pattern matching facilities-that make native actors a viable approach for many robust, elastic, and highly distributed developments. We demonstrate the feasibility of CAF in three scenarios: first for elastic, upscaling environments, second for including heterogeneous hardware like GPGPUs, and third for distributed runtime systems. Extensive performance evaluations indicate ideal runtime behaviour for up to 64 cores at very low memory footprint, or in the presence of GPUs. In these tests, CAF continuously outperforms the competing actor environments Erlang, Charm++, SalsaLite, Scala, ActorFoundry, and even the OpenMPI.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting actor programming in C++

Charousset

Hiesgen

Schmidt

2016

Computer Languages, Systems & Structures

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“…Many authors, such as [34,46,37], noted that the actor model does not address the issue of coordination. Coordination requires the possibility for an actor to have expectations on another actor's behavior, but the mere asynchronous message passing gives no means to foresee how a message receiver will behave.…”

Section: Meyer's Forces: Processor Action and Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Data- and Norm-Aware Multiagent Systems

Baldoni

Baroglio

Calvanese

et al. 2016

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

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Abstract. We recall the key abstractions and models on which the major approaches to software specification rely, using Meyer's forces of computation as dimensions of comparison. Based on the identified strengths and lacks, we introduce data-awareness and of norm-awareness as recommended properties, explaining the advantages they bring about. We show that multiagent systems are a good candidate for the development of a data-and norm-aware programming, tracing directions for the realization of multiagent systems that are data and norm-aware. Finally, we report and comment some proposals from the multiagent systems literature that, though developed independently and not inserted in an organic framework, already face specific aspects that are relevant to bring about norm and data-awareness.

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“…Moreover, actors are often used without distribution. For example, in [11] the software from repository [12] is studied. From around 750 programs, 16 are isolated as representative of "real-world actor programs".…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fully concurrent garbage collection of actors on many-core machines

Clebsch

Drossopoulou

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages &Amp; Application

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Disposal of dead actors in actor-model languages is as important as disposal of unreachable objects in object-oriented languages. In current practice, programmers are required to either manually terminate actors, or they have to rely on garbage collection systems that monitor actor mutation through write barriers, thread coordination through locks etc. These techniques, however, prevent the collector from being fully concurrent.We developed a protocol that allows garbage collection to run fully concurrently with all actors. The main challenges in concurrent garbage collection is the detection of cycles of sleeping actors in the actors graph, in the presence of concurrent mutation of this graph. Our protocol is solely built on message passing: it uses deferred direct reference counting, a dedicated actor for the detection of (cyclic) garbage, and a confirmation protocol (to deal with the mutation of the actor graph).We present our ideas informally through an example, and then present a formal model, prove soundness and argue completeness. We have implemented the protocol as part of a runtime library. As a preliminary performance evaluation, we discuss the performance of our approach as currently used at a financial institution, and use four benchmarks from the literature to compare our approach with other actormodel systems. These preliminary results indicate that the overhead of our approach is small.

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Why Do Scala Developers Mix the Actor Model with other Concurrency Models?

Cited by 67 publications

References 24 publications

Revisiting actor programming in C++

Revisiting actor programming in C++

Towards Data- and Norm-Aware Multiagent Systems

Fully concurrent garbage collection of actors on many-core machines

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