Concurrent Systems Need Both Sequences And Serializers

Abstract

Contemporary concurrent programming languages fall roughly into two classes. Languages in the first class support the notion of a sequence of values and some kind of pipelining operation over the sequence of values. Languages in the second class support the notion of transactions and some way to serialize transactions. In terms of the actor model of computation this distinction corresponds to the difference between serialized and unserialized actors. In this paper the utility of modeling both serialized and unserialized actors in a coherent formalism is demonstrated.