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Concept
Actor model and process calculi
Summary
In computer science, the Actor model and process calculi are two closely related approaches to the modelling of concurrent digital computation. See Actor model and process calculi history.
There are many similarities between the two approaches, but also several differences (some philosophical, some technical):
There is only one Actor model (although it has numerous formal systems for design, analysis, verification, modeling, etc.); there are numerous process calculi, developed for reasoning about a variety of different kinds of concurrent systems at various levels of detail (including calculi that incorporate time, stochastic transitions, or constructs specific to application areas such as security analysis).
The Actor model was inspired by the laws of physics and depends on them for its fundamental axioms, i.e. physical laws (see Actor model theory); the process calculi were originally inspired by algebra .
Processes in the process calculi are anonymous, and communicate by sending messages either through named channels (synchronous or asynchronous), or via ambients (which can also be used to model channel-like communications ). In contrast, actors in the Actor model possess an identity, and communicate by sending messages to the mailing addresses of other actors (this style of communication can also be used to model channel-like communications—see below).
The publications on the Actor model and on process calculi have a fair number of cross-references, acknowledgments, and reciprocal citations (see Actor model and process calculi history).
Indirect communication using channels (e.g. Gilles Kahn and David MacQueen [1977]) has been an important issue for communication in parallel and concurrent computation affecting both semantics and performance. Some process calculi differ from the Actor model in their use of channels as opposed to direct communication.
Synchronous channels have the property that a sender putting a message in the channel must wait for a receiver to get the message out of the channel before the sender can proceed.
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