Your actor-modelled example doesn't touch the idea behind promises, ie the background operations should return a result that is usable by the "main thread". In

Your actor-modelled example doesn't touch the idea behind promises, ie the background operations should return a result that is usable by the "main thread". In your example, that would be "result" being passed in some way to "more_random_other_work". The way to do it would be closer to something like that: do_random_other_work(); actor = spawn(function() { bfn_args = some_setup(); result = blocking_fn(bfn_args); emit(result); }); result = wait_for_result(actor) more_random_other_work(result);