Hi Nils, A while back, I also took a stab* at implementing Erlang-style actors in Clojure, along with solutions for a few classic concurrency problems (Dining Philosophers, Sleeping Barber). I was blown away by how easy it was to implement actor semantics on top of agents.
Comparing our respective efforts, I see a lot of room for improvement in mine :) I like how your actors send messages containing the address of the recipient, which seems truer to the actor model. Also, you raise a great point regarding pattern matching; I think that can greatly simplify the message handlers in my code. Looks like it's time for me to get acquainted with core.match :) Thanks for the food for thought! *https://github.com/bitsai/clojure-actors On Friday, December 2, 2011 1:17:43 PM UTC-7, Nils Bertschinger wrote: > > Hi, > > how do Clojure agents relate to Erlang actors? > To gain some insights, I tried to implement Erlang style message > passing between agents. The first version is just a very incomplete > sketch (no mailbox, case instead of pattern matching ...), but already > shows that it is quite easily doable: > https://github.com/bertschi/clojure-stuff/blob/master/src/stuff/actors.clj > > The idea is that the agent holds a dispatch function which is then > called by ! (send) with the message to be send. Somehow it resembles > the way closures can be used to implement an object system. Thus, > agents seem to be the functional analog of agents: > Functional programming Object-oriented > programming > sequential closure > object > concurrent agent > actors > > Another great design from Rich Hickey! Clojure is fun and gets better > every day ... > > Thanks, > > Nils > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
