Chapter 8.  Actors

 

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

 
 --Leslie Lamport

Throughout this book, we have concentrated on many different abstractions for concurrent programming. Most of these abstractions assume the presence of shared memory. Futures and promises, concurrent data structures, and software transactional memory, are best suited to shared-memory systems. While the shared-memory assumption ensures that these facilities are efficient, it also limits them to applications running on a single computer. In this chapter, we consider a programming model that is equally applicable to a shared-memory machine or a distributed system, namely, the

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