We are migrating and finishing the upcoming GridGain’s book “Pragmatic Cloud Computing with GridGain using Java and Scala”. Here’s a short chapter that I’ve just finished on the subject of:
“Remote Actors vs. GridGain and Concurrency Unification”
Enjoy!
Replied to the post on one of the Scala user groups:
In the long run I believe actors are irrelevant as it is just a specific technique for expressing certain types of algos. It’s simply too trivial to really matter when companies contemplate the move to a new general purpose programming language and its eco-system. Other (much more important) properties of that Scala eco-system will drive its adoption.
It’s like saying that someone will pick Java over C# because of
java.util.concurrent.Further more, the distributed world is infinitely more complex than a share-nothing message passing paradigm. If that would be the case – we’d all be using RMI and MDBs today. But we are not…
When it comes to STMs, Supervisors, Flows, Transactors… I think even Akka folks would admit that these are rather esoteric things. Not every one writes telco switches in FP-only language that doesn’t support mutability. Copying 25 year old technology from Erlang is not a guaranteed bullet-proof solution. Technology has really, really moved on since then. Concurrency, parallelism and determinism have different meaning and properties in a distributed world of today.
I’m not bashing Akka/Actors here – love them both. It’s just the reality of the world in my opinion.
Kind of sums up my feeling towards Scala adoption and actors.
