I'm fairly confident that Erlang's "actors" (the language authors didn't know about Hewitt's work at the time) were originally local-only, since the objective was robust processing on standalone network routers.
I suspect the fact that asynchronous messaging turns out to be particularly well-suited to network communications was a happy accident.
Anyway, I guess my point is that local-only actors can be useful, but I definitely agree that network transparency is a huge win.
I suspect the fact that asynchronous messaging turns out to be particularly well-suited to network communications was a happy accident.
Anyway, I guess my point is that local-only actors can be useful, but I definitely agree that network transparency is a huge win.