2026-07-17T18:55:03Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:7253 2024-03-12T11:58:42Z ddc:004 open_access

Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors Fowler, Simon Lindley, Sam Wadler, Philip Actors Channels Communication centric Programming Languages 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Simon Fowler and Sam Lindley and Philip Wadler 2017 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 74, 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.11 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-72536 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.11 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode