In a nutshell, an Actor is an object that has its own [cooperative] thread and message queue. Actors interact by message-passing instead of shared state. The idea is to eliminate the need for standard synchronization primitives like semaphors and locks, and get rid of the race conditions and deadlocks that plague multi-threaded programs. There's a very good overview on the website for the new Ruby library Revactor:
http://revactor.org/philosophy
Actors are also built into languages like Erlang and Io.The only hard part about implementing Actors in Obj-C appears to be the underlying dependency on coroutines. Steve Dekorte [author of Io] has a newish coroutine implementation in C that works on OS X. When I discovered that last year, I then found an Objective-C wrapper by dPompa, but that relies on his HigherOrderMessaging library, which is incompatible with 10.5 and hasn't yet been updated.
If nothing's currently available, I'd gladly work together with one or more other motivated people to get coroutines and/or Actors working. Anyone else interested?
—Jens
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