As described by Carl Hewitt, the inventor of the Actor model:
- CSP uses named channels (coincidentally called channels in Go) with anonymous processes (goroutines in Go)
- Actors are anonymous channels (mailbox addresses) with named processes (actors).
Carl Hewitt states that CSP was created to create a concurrency model around algebra and having named channels was the only way to accomplish that due to the constraints of algebra.
The Actor model's foundation is in physics. Here's an excellent video of Carl Hewitt giving an off the cuff explanation of the Actor Model[0], and some notes I took while watching it[1] (please add more notes if you can, I get confused about this topic constantly).
Another important note is that there are many different implementations of CSP but only one implementation of the Actor model.
- CSP uses named channels (coincidentally called channels in Go) with anonymous processes (goroutines in Go)
- Actors are anonymous channels (mailbox addresses) with named processes (actors).
Carl Hewitt states that CSP was created to create a concurrency model around algebra and having named channels was the only way to accomplish that due to the constraints of algebra.
The Actor model's foundation is in physics. Here's an excellent video of Carl Hewitt giving an off the cuff explanation of the Actor Model[0], and some notes I took while watching it[1] (please add more notes if you can, I get confused about this topic constantly).
Another important note is that there are many different implementations of CSP but only one implementation of the Actor model.
0 - http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Hewitt-Meijer-and-...
1 - https://gist.github.com/rbishop/9082539