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This is what I find most interesting about the Erlang/Elixir world. The programming language design predated SMP by about 20 years - the actor model was chosen
by rkangel 4y ago
This is what I find most interesting about the Erlang/Elixir world. The programming language design predated SMP by about 20 years - the actor model was chosen because it was a good way to reason about programs not for parallelism. Then multicore processors arrived, and it was 'just' a VM enhancement to make Erlang programs fully parallelised.
Sometimes you just get lucky.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoJust a nitpick -- the actor model was not chosen, the BEAM just happens to look like an actor model. The BEAM architecture was chosen for fault tolerance and the features you want for fault tolerance naturally guide you to something actor-ish. Also, the actor model says very little about fault tolerance concern (its concern is in improving computational efficiency bottlenecks)