

Actors in Clojure -- Why not? - mnemonik
http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/2010/06/actors-in-clojure-why-not/

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swannodette
The article seems largely theoretical in nature - "efficient Actor
implementations are possible". Why no links to these implementations? And if
they actually do exist how do they compare to Clojure's use-it-today high
performance single-machine concurrency implementation?

Also, his counterpoints sound like they either add incidental complexity or
refer to _papers_ not _implementations_.

In anycase, Rich wasn't banging on Actors. He simply was arguing for his
approach to concurrency over one of the most popular Actor implementations
actively used in production today - Erlang.

And finally, here's a pretty interesting project for distributed computing
with Clojure: <http://github.com/amitrathore/swarmiji>

~~~
calibraxis
Did you check out the author's "pure actor-based programming language", Humus?
(It's not easy to notice, as he only mentioned it once, and white-on-bright-
blue isn't easy to read.)

<http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/humus/>

------
Zak
Clojure's mechanisms for concurrent state are more powerful and flexible than
actors. Clojure's agents actually have a lot in common with actors, but take
arbitrary functions instead of predefined messages. From a Clojure point of
view, actors are agents with restricted functionality to enable use in a
distributed environment.

Adding actors to Clojure might be a good idea, but they should be explicitly
for the purpose of distributed systems, and probably built on top of agents.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Actors are _not_ the same as agents. Actors have their own process calculus,
and are based on ideas about time, ordering and simultaneity drawn from
physics.

I don't know that agents in the Clojure sense have been studied in a comp sci
sort of way. (Some agent systems have been studied - I'm not sure how much
transfers to this design.)

