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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a popular idea recently. After reading this paper[1] I ended up building this into my actor based language[2]. It makes a lot of sense in actor based concurrency, I'd be curious to know what rust devs think of this since it's a bit different from how they often do concurrency.

[1] https://simonjf.com/writing/eventactors.pdf

[2] https://march-lang.org/docs/choreography/

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Have you looked at Microsoft Orleans by chance? I'm curious what you think of it. The concept is Virtual Actors by Microsoft research.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/orleans-vir...

I had Claude implement a similar one for me in Rust which I'm pausing for now, I'm prototyping a simpler version of Orleans in Go that I eventually want to port over to Rust as my v2 from scratch. The ideas in Virtual Actors reminded me a lot of Erlang, but simple to use in a language like C# I'm still surprised it didn't take off in other languages.

Honestly, if Go supported message passing between processes and over the network out of the box, it would make for a slightly more interesting language, I still love Go though.

This is an interesting question! I'm not an expert in Orleans but I have looked at it alongside koka. The user defined key vs pid distinction is important and using a user defined key like in Orleans has advantages for keeping track of their virtual actors(grains). Their automatic lifecycle management is nice, but you really have to trust the runtime to know when something is really idle. I think their failure handling with auto state restoration is a mistake, recreating an actor with bad state is a recipe for crashes.

What I have that Orleans is missing is compile time protocol checking, typesd and hash checked remote calls, capability management, cluster authentication, and no stop the world GC. Orleans doesn't have choreography per se, they have sagas as a convention.

Yeah, GO routines are meant to solve different problems than share nothing actors.

Nice! I might have to check out yours sometime, I did think about converting a language I built up for .NET with a Python inspired syntax to treat Orleans as a first class citizen as an experiment to see if I could build a sort of DSL for Orleans.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/Culebral

I had to pause for now, been building other things I have wanted made for years with Claude, Culebral was my dive into seeing how 1 million tokens in Claude could accomplish, I think current state took under 1 or 2 million tokens from Claude total.

I know it sounds silly, but the only .NET Pythonesque language I saw available is basically abandonware iirc so I wanted something that was more .NET specific so I could write less code to do the same as I would in C#.

That's pretty neat. I love the things I see people doing like this where they build up some cool functionality behind a nice and straightforward syntax.

Yeah, claude can get pretty far into language projects on 1 million tokens.

Wow, March is cool! Are you in touch with Ashton Wiersdorf? He been developing a choreographic programming DSL for Elixir, called Chorex: https://github.com/utahplt/chorex

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

I'm not in touch with him, but I have looked at Chorex. I was hoping to see him at ElixirConf but I had to change my plans last minute. Have you used Chorex?

Not directly, but we’ve talked about it a few times. He’s in the choreographic programming zulip channel - maybe you could join and tell us more about March? https://multiparty.zulipchat.com/

Thanks! I’ll take a look tomorrow.

*edit it seems like I need an invite.

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