[Haskell-cafe] Best Actor system?

[Christopher Allen]

I don't actually want to get drawn into this, but one point would be that
it's really just the same fallacies as OOP in general, but concurrent. The
idea that isolation behind an interface (message passing or not) is going
to prevent unnecessary mutation or side effects from getting out of control.

In practice, it doesn't do that at all and the fact that you're making your
inter-dependencies more implicit, rather than explicit, through the use of
isolated buckets of side-effecting state and mutation is going to make it
harder rather than easier to debug the program when it invariably breaks.
I'd rather get a call-stack if I'm going to abandon Haskell-y goodness. And
your Actors *will* get into a bad state, so you'll end up writing Inspector
and Debugger mixins just to keep a handle on the complexity when they get
into that bad state.

It's not impossible for Actors to make sense. I used agents (which are not
full-blown Actors per se) in Clojure for side-effect isolation,
serialization, and thread safety to good effect, but I kept how much "work"
they did to a bare minimum and tried to keep everything in pure functions
as long as I could.

It's just that I see programmers with a shiny new hammer looking for every
nail they can find.



On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Zongheng Yang <zongheng.y at gmail.com>wrote:

> Can anyone give some detailed cons of Akka / actor model?
>
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Alois Cochard <alois.cochard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I have good experience with actors (Scala/Akka), and I can tell you that
> you
> > should avoid them as much as possible.
> > I think the model is good if you need to do some low level concurrency
> > coding on a language that don't have effect tracking in types.
> >
> > Having used the Async library from Marlow, I highly recommend it... and
> it
> > probably cover a big percentage of traditional concurrency use cases.
> >
> > You still have Haskell Cloud if you want distributed messaging.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> >
> >
> > On 27 March 2014 06:29, james <james at mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Having been introduced to actors by looking at Erlang, I discovered
> Akka.
> >>
> >> It seems that the performance is pretty impressive and I like the model.
> >>
> >> There seem to be several basic Actor libraries in Hackage, but they
> don't
> >> seem
> >> to be very actively developed.
> >>
> >> I'm more interested in the model for programming within a single runtime
> >> than I am for distributed systems, but message and dispatch performance
> >> definitely is important.
> >>
> >> Can anyone share experiences with the different packages?  Is any one
> >> of them stand-out?
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >> James
> >>
> >>
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Alois Cochard
> > http://aloiscochard.blogspot.com
> > http://twitter.com/aloiscochard
> > http://github.com/aloiscochard
> >
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