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Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors

Authors Simon Fowler, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler

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Keywords
  • Actors
  • Channels
  • Communication centric Programming Languages

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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.

Cite As Get BibTex

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

Author Details

Simon Fowler
Sam Lindley
Philip Wadler

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