Actor, Thread and me
summary
Argues that the actor model is a model not a panacea and often isn’t inherently safer than threads; builds a select-based event loop ("bartender") in Ruby with nonblocking wrappers, a small RPC‑style server and a DB protocol client that run, and experiments with both per-actor queues (method_missing dispatch) and a central Linda tuple space. Shows it works but reveals hidden blocking and context‑saving complexity (fibers yield to scheduler, long unknown blocking calls still require spawning threads), so actors trade shared‑memory races for hard coordination costs.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction and sponsors
- 3:20What is the Actor model
- 10:53Problems with Actor model
- 14:23Building a messaging system
- 20:53Actor implementations in Ruby
- 22:41Conclusion and Q&A
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