Scalability with Actors
Traditional multithreaded applications rely on accessing data located in shared memory. The mechanism relies on synchronization monitors such as locks, mutexes, or semaphores to avoid deadlocks and inconsistent mutable states. Even for the most experienced software engineer, debugging multithreaded applications is not a simple endeavor.
The second problem with shared memory threads in Java is the high computation overhead caused by continuous context switches. Context switching consists of saving the current stack frame delimited by the base and stack pointers into the heap memory and loading another stack frame.
These restrictions and complexities can be avoided using a concurrency model that relies on the following key principles:
Immutable data structures
Asynchronous communication
The Actor model
The Actor model, originally introduced in the Erlang programming language, addresses these issues [12:3]. The purpose of using the Actor model is twofold as follows:
It distributes...
