Actors: What, Why, and How (#161)

Description

Actors: What, Why and How Presented by Donovan Preston Since the dawn of concurrency research, there have been two camps: shared everything, and shared nothing. Most modern applications use threads for concurrency, a shared everything architecture. Actors, however, use a shared nothing architecture where lightweight processes communicate with each other using message passing. Actors can change their state, create a new Actor, send a message to any Actor it has the Address of, and wait for a specific kind of message to arrive in it's mailbox. We will discuss the benefits of using the Actor architecture and strategies for implementing an Actor system in Python. [http://bitbucket.org/fzzzy/python-actors/](http://bitbucket.org/fzzzy/python- actors/)