Tag Archives: consistency

High Availability for Mutable Shared State

Mutable shared state is the root of all evil in concurrent systems. The history of concurrent computation is a basically the story of approaches to managing mutable shared state. The thread model, which has long held the dominant position, leads to intractable complexity [1]. The actor model captures state in the behavior of an actor. [...]

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Composing Actors

A significant challenge in developing concurrent systems is the problem of composability. We create a solution that works properly in isolation, but when composed with other solutions leads to interference. The actor model ensures that individual actors may be composed without changing their behavior. Interference is prevented by definition, keeping the system consistent. In order [...]

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Deconstructing the Actor Model

The Actor Model of Computation, as defined by Carl Hewitt [1] and elaborated by Gul Agha [2], defines three primitive operations. These operations are “Send”, “Create” and “Become”. The “Send” operation transmits an asynchronous message to a known receiver. The “Create” operation constructs a new actor with a specified initial behavior. The “Become” operation defines [...]

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