Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors

Fowler, S. , Lindley, S. and Wadler, P. (2017) Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors. In: 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017), Barcelona, Spain, 18-23 Jun 2017, p. 11. ISBN 9783959770354 (doi: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.11)

Abstract

Channel- and actor-based programming languages are both used in practice, but the two are often confused. Languages such as Go provide anonymous processes which communicate using buffers or rendezvous points---known as channels---while languages such as Erlang provide addressable processes---known as actors---each with a single incoming message queue. The lack of a common representation makes it difficult to reason about translations that exist in the folklore. We define a calculus lambda-ch for typed asynchronous channels, and a calculus lambda-act for typed actors. We define translations from lambda-act into lambda-ch and lambda-ch into lambda-act and prove that both are type- and semantics-preserving. We show that our approach accounts for synchronisation and selective receive in actor systems and discuss future extensions to support guarded choice and behavioural types.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This work was supported by EPSRC grants EP/L01503X/1 (University of Edinburgh CDT in Pervasive Parallelism) and EP/K034413/1 (A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution).
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Fowler, Dr Simon
• Authors: Fowler, S., Lindley, S., and Wadler, P.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 1868-8969
• ISBN: 9783959770354
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 Simon Fowler, Sam Lindley, and Philip Wadler
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017): 11
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License