Hacker News Reader

It appears to me as if Golang has implemented part of the actor model. As I recall, it was neither set up to transfer free-form messages between the actors nor for the actors to persist beyond the given task.

Erlang has had both for over 20 years; it has also had green threads for equally as long—something I don't know if Golang has. I'm sure Golang cannot split itself to run on multiple machines with its actor model. Erlang can.

View on HN

Go pulled more from the ideas of Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) than it did from actors. In particular, communication is synchronous (excepting the use of buffered channels, though even there if the buffer is full the sender blocks) and it uses channels, while the go routines themselves are anonymous and cannot be directly communicated with (to the point you can't even get a handle for them).

This is in contrast to, say, Erlang which is closer to actors than CSP, with its named processes (actors) and their mailboxes and no channels (though you can use a process as a channel).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com