Visual presentation of threading versus message passing and actor models

Question

I'm looking for a good slideshow/pdf/video explaining the differences in approach and thinking from hand-written threading of applications compared to the more abstracted and easier to use message passing and actor models. Does anyone know of existing resources to explain these concepts with good diagrams and visualizations?

Answer 1

It is slightly difficult to make direct comparisons without long, painful digressions, or a largely theoretical discussion. However, the following can be easily read, and I believe that the comparisons will form naturally for anyone familiar with the threading model.

Google's language GO uses message passing among co-routines as a core part of its concurrency model. There is a lot more information on GO at golang.org, and the following URL provides information about their concurrency model in GO.

• http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#concurrency

This is a paper written by Edward Lee (Berkeley EECS department chair) called The Problem with Threads. It is a pitch for the actor model, and is a good read. Also note that there are other papers by Edward that deal with the problem with threads (visit his homepage for more papers).

• http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf