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Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors

Authors Simon Fowler, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler

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Simon Fowler
Sam Lindley
Philip Wadler

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Simon Fowler, Sam Lindley, and Philip Wadler. Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors. In 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 74, pp. 11:1-11:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.11

Abstract

Channel- and actor-based programming languages are both used in practice, but the two are often confused. Languages such as Go provide anonymous processes which communicate using buffers or rendezvous points---known as channels---while languages such as Erlang provide addressable processes---known as actors---each with a single incoming message queue. The lack of a common representation makes it difficult to reason about translations that exist in the folklore. We define a calculus lambda-ch for typed asynchronous channels, and a calculus lambda-act for typed actors. We define translations from lambda-act into lambda-ch and lambda-ch into lambda-act and prove that both are type- and semantics-preserving. We show that our approach accounts for synchronisation and selective receive in actor systems and discuss future extensions to support guarded choice and behavioural types.
Keywords
  • Actors
  • Channels
  • Communication centric Programming Languages

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