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I’ve been doing multithreaded embedded system for over 20 years, and the latest system is a custom Actor C++ framework (so yes, I’ve professionally used Actors

I’ve been doing multithreaded embedded system for over 20 years, and the latest system is a custom Actor C++ framework (so yes, I’ve professionally used Actors in a shiping system). Having said that, I find Apple’s implementation exceptionally complex. Aiming for safety and catering to inexperienced devs, they’ve created something way too complex for less experienced devs to understand. In my personal opinion, they should have overlooked Actor safety and gone with a simpler model which is easily understandable, and rely on experienced devs to understand what is happening under the covers and program accordingly. To use a cooking analogy, We live in a bizarro world where chefs are being asked to abandon cooking knives (they’re dangerous), and to use dozens of kitchen aids for safety. And the limitations this produces…

DarkNova6 3y ago
I wonder. Do you happen to know how Swifts new Concurrency Model compares to C# and Java 21?
- neonsunset 3y ago
  Yet to read the article :) C# and Rust async models are based on top of state machines and cooperative yielding back to the executor. The difference between C# and Rust is a tradeoff of either the ability to just not think and use async/await naturally with really nice defaults but paying for those with heap allocations of state captured by continuations or dealing with the memory model explicitly which requires more effort but gives you fully configurable and/or deterministic behavior, that can (and usually does) achieve far lower overhead. Java uses green (virtual) threads where the runtime can preempt (pause/suspend) them (keeping virtual thread stack in memory) and schedule the execution of a different green thread on top of the current physical one, not dissimilar to C#/Rust as they achieve so explicitly, where the next work item is executed by the threadpool once the current one yields.
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DarkNova6 3y ago

I wonder. Do you happen to know how Swifts new Concurrency Model compares to C# and Java 21?

neonsunset 3y ago
Yet to read the article :) C# and Rust async models are based on top of state machines and cooperative yielding back to the executor. The difference between C# and Rust is a tradeoff of either the ability to just not think and use async/await naturally with really nice defaults but paying for those with heap allocations of state captured by continuations or dealing with the memory model explicitly which requires more effort but gives you fully configurable and/or deterministic behavior, that can (and usually does) achieve far lower overhead. Java uses green (virtual) threads where the runtime can preempt (pause/suspend) them (keeping virtual thread stack in memory) and schedule the execution of a different green thread on top of the current physical one, not dissimilar to C#/Rust as they achieve so explicitly, where the next work item is executed by the threadpool once the current one yields.

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