Pure dynamic casts?

[Robert Jacques]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:59:23 -0400, Jeremie Pelletier <jeremiep at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Robert Jacques wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:46:13 -0400, Jeremie Pelletier  
>> <jeremiep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Its the same for concurrency, I can think of vector processing,  
>>> functional calls, STM, message passing and shared memory off the top  
>>> of my head. All being valid models with each their pros and cons,  
>>> together forming a complete all-around solution.
>>>
>>> Jeremie
>> Don't forget task-based or lock-free.
>
> Oh yeah, thanks! Those were covered by Bartosz in his blog right? I  
> think he used the term Actor for task based programming, I really  
> enjoyed reading these articles.

There are many things called Actors, but they generally boil down to a  
process/thread/object + message passing. It's a good model, particularly  
for the cloud.  Task programming is generally intra-process and works on  
the level of a single work-task (aka function). Cilk, futures or Intel's  
Threading Building Blocks are the canonical examples. The nice thing (I  
think) about a good work-stealing runtime is that it can provide the  
back-end for CPU-vector processing, tasks/futures, intra-process actors  
and functional calls.