What does Lambda and Actor Models have in common?
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Every software engineer should learn about the Actor Model, even if they don't work with Erlang, Elixir or Akka. It opens up your mind to a new way of thinking about computation and concurrency. And what better way to learn than to hear from its inventor, Carl Hewitt (R.I.P)? This conversation between Carl, Erik Meijer (of the Rx fame) and Clemens Szyperski is a must-see! An actor is the fundamental unit of computation which embodies the 3 things – processing, storage and communications – that are essential to computation. Actors come in systems, and they have addresses so that one actor can send messages to another actor. Every actor has a mailbox, and when an actor receives a message, it can:
Multiple messages might arrive in the mailbox at the same time, but they are processed one at a time. An arbiter decides the order in which these messages are processed. So, inside the body of an actor, there is no concurrency because messages are processed one at a time. The best way to experience the Actor Model is to spend time with Erlang, Elixir or Akka. F#'s MailboxProcessor also implements a similar idea. Looking beyond code, you can also see the same pattern in AWS Lambda! Where a Lambda execution environment handles only one event at a time, and concurrency is managed at the platform level. |
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