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Interesting. I've worked with Akka heavily over the last 3 years and that was built borrowing many of Erlang's designs. I'm sort of suprised to see that the lan

Interesting. I've worked with Akka heavily over the last 3 years and that was built borrowing many of Erlang's designs. I'm sort of suprised to see that the language was not built with the intent of implementing the actor model. Fault tolerance through supervision was introduced into the actor model here but the way that state can exist and is isolated for high concurrency systems makes the actor model very easy to build into and reason about in concurrent scenarios. Akka's addition to the actor model - location transparency - takes the actor model a little further and coupled with Scala makes a really nice language and concurrency pairing. Akka has the actor model as a library added where Erlang has all of the qualities built into the language. I'd like to learn erlang still but the contribution of the Erlang/OTP team in building fault tolerance into the Actor model has been an incredibly important contribution. As highly concurrent applications are becoming the norm with multicore CPUs being everywhere, I can't see the actor model going away any time soon.

rvirding 11y ago
One difference is that Erlang's concurrency and error handling in the language is more basic than Akka's and does not directly provide fault-tolerance through supervision but does provide the primitives to implement. All of OTP is implemented in Erlang with these basic primitives. These primitives are actually very simple, the difficulty was getting the right set of simple primitives on which to build the rest. Also I think you will find that a lot of features which are very similar of Akka's location transparency were built-in to the distribution mechanisms which are part of Erlang. We were at least thinking of distribution from a very early stage.
59nadir 11y ago
> Akka's addition to the actor model - location transparency - takes the actor model a little further and coupled with Scala makes a really nice language and concurrency pairing. In terms of location transparency, what are we referring to here? Because talking to a process in Erlang is location independent. It can be running on another node if you'd like and you don't need to care. I take "location transparency" to mean exactly this.

rvirding 11y ago

One difference is that Erlang's concurrency and error handling in the language is more basic than Akka's and does not directly provide fault-tolerance through supervision but does provide the primitives to implement. All of OTP is implemented in Erlang with these basic primitives. These primitives are actually very simple, the difficulty was getting the right set of simple primitives on which to build the rest. Also I think you will find that a lot of features which are very similar of Akka's location transparency were built-in to the distribution mechanisms which are part of Erlang. We were at least thinking of distribution from a very early stage.

59nadir 11y ago

> Akka's addition to the actor model - location transparency - takes the actor model a little further and coupled with Scala makes a really nice language and concurrency pairing. In terms of location transparency, what are we referring to here? Because talking to a process in Erlang is location independent. It can be running on another node if you'd like and you don't need to care. I take "location transparency" to mean exactly this.