| I've not directly used Hewitt actors, but read the book and worked with
other people in France.
Hewitt's actors are a foundation, but are limited in some sense regarding
intra-actor concurrency, etc...
More complete work has been done by Sony and Keio University (Pr. Tokoro)
in Concurrent Smalltalk, and a useful testbed has been designed by J.P. Briot
Paris VI in France above Smalltalk. It is public software, and runs on top
of Smalltalk. This testbed allows you to experiment various actor strategies.
Contact
[email protected]
See also their tutorials in last Oopsla conferences.
For more detailed bibliography, just ask me.
Actors are useful for implementing concurrency within OO languages,
the main applications I know concern operating systems, distributed or not.
They are also useful to model parallel architectures, which I have experimented
recently.
They have been used in DAI as well.
Regards,
Annick Fron
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| I've written a master's thesis on garbage collection of actors in a
distributed, real-time environment. Another DEC employee, Doug
Washabaugh, extended my research in his thesis.
As somewhat eluded to in .2, the actor model of computation is a
theoretical model, which means that certain real-world considerations
are ignored (e.g., memory constraints) to simplify reasoning about the
model. Handling these important real-world constraints is one reason
for my thesis.
Actor references:
Agha, Gul, "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in
Distributed Systems". MIT Press, 1986 (ISBN 0-262-01092-5). I believe
Agha wrote the first definitive work on actors; this is his Ph.D. dissertation.
Clinger, Will, "Foundations of Actor Semantics". MIT AI Labs
Technical Report AI-TR-633, May, 1981. Heavy into denotational
semantics. Definately NOT light reading.
Check OOPSLA and ECOOP proceedings from about 1987 forward. I
know you'll find stuff in the 1990 proceedings.
Agha still does work in Actors, or at least he seems to be on top of
what other people are doing. His email address is [email protected] (I think).
-Jeff
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| I Agree that Gul Agha's work is definitely a reference.
See also
M. Tokoro, Keio University, Yokohama, Japan
O. Nierstrasz, Geneva, Switzerland
P. Wegner, Brown University, providence, RI (Eds.)
Object-Based Concurrent Computing,
ECOOP'91 Workshop Geneva, Switzerland, JUly 15-16, 1991 Proc.
in
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Eds.: G.Goos, J. Hartmanis. Vol. 612
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