Message Passing vs Shared Memory

[amin...@gmail.com]

Hello,


Message Passing vs Shared Memory

Read more here:

http://boron.physics.metu.edu.tr/ozdogan/GraduateParallelComputing.old/week8/node9.html


And now about The disadvantages of Actor model:

1- Not all languages easily enforce immutability

Erlang, the language that first popularized actors has immutability at
its core but Java and Scala (actually the JVM) does not enforce
immutability.


2- Still pretty complex

Actors are based on an asynchronous model of programming which is not so
straight forward and easy to model in all scenarios; it is particularly
difficult to handle errors and failure scenarios.


3- Does not prevent deadlock or starvation

Two actors can be in the state that wait message one from another; thus
you have a deadlock just like with locks, although much easier to debug.
With transactional memory however you are guaranteed deadlock free.


4- Not so efficient

Because of enforced immutability and because many actors have to switch
in using the same thread actors won't be as efficient as lock-based
concurrency.



Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.