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Clojure's mechanisms for concurrent state are more powerful and flexible than actors. Clojure's agents actually have a lot in common with actors, but take arbit
by Zak 16y ago
Clojure's mechanisms for concurrent state are more powerful and flexible than actors. Clojure's agents actually have a lot in common with actors, but take arbitrary functions instead of predefined messages. From a Clojure point of view, actors are agents with restricted functionality to enable use in a distributed environment.
Adding actors to Clojure might be a good idea, but they should be explicitly for the purpose of distributed systems, and probably built on top of agents.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoActors are not the same as agents. Actors have their own process calculus, and are based on ideas about time, ordering and simultaneity drawn from physics. I don't know that agents in the Clojure sense have been studied in a comp sci sort of way. (Some agent systems have been studied - I'm not sure how much transfers to this design.)