D 2015/2016 Vision?

[Jim Hewes via Digitalmars-d]

On 10/8/2015 11:56 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 18:19:51 UTC, Jim Hewes wrote:
>
> Yes, there are libraries, but for it to be pleasant I think language
> support is needed. I've linked to this video before, but it is quite
> entertaining if you haven't seen it yet:
>
> https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Hewitt-Meijer-and-Szyperski-The-Actor-Model-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask
>

Yeah, I watched that after I saw your other post with the link. Thanks. 
One early question that I have (that someone else also asked in a 
comment below the video) is about design and the granularity of actors. 
What sorts of things do you define as an actor? How big does an entity 
need to be before you should make it an actor?

>
> Carl Hewitt stresses the difference from other concurrency models that
> use non-determinism by pointing out that a key quality with actor based
> systems is indeterminism. (i.e. that things may simply evaporate without
> notice).
>

Another thing I noted was when he said once you get to 1000 cores the 
programmer knows nothing about the environment. So rather than figure 
out new ways to manage these things like locks and threads, it makes 
sense to get to a more abstract level where you don't even deal with it 
at all anymore.

>
> I don't know much about C++ actor frame works, but if you only want to
> play with actors then you could give pony-lang.org a spin. Not sure if
> they really focus on indeterminism, though.
>

Thanks! I'll give it a look. It's probably good for playing around with 
to get a feel for it.