42. Actors

Fatal Error

Chris and Soroush discuss the Actor model from Chris Lattner’s concurrency manifesto.

• Concurrency Manifesto, part 2: Actors
• Actor model (Wikipedia)
• ActorKit: “A lightweight actor framework in Objective-C”
• Ownership Manifesto
• What are move semantics, exactly?
• Go FAQ: Why is there no type inheritance?
• Object Oriented Inheritance in Go
• Under the hood of Futures & Promises in Swift
• Episode 30: Server-Side Swift
• Episode 33: Server-Side Swift in Practice

Note from Chris: I failed to realize this while we were recording, but move semantics should also allow passing a non-ValueSemantical reference type into an actor method — if ownership of some parameter moves to the actor method and previous references become invalid, the actor knows it can use that reference type without anyone else touching it. That’s another way the alternate ownership model pairs elegantly with this actor pattern!