This sort of language cruft makes me realize that Lisp had it right all along.
Yet somehow the Lisps seem to be doing all sorts of concurrency rather poorly.
Swift Distributed Actors
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#22After using a data structure first framework like Dask I can’t imagine ever going back to an actor oriented approach.
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Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#23This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.
My experience is the opposite: using Swift for Apple ecosystem development basically removed all of the benefits that Swift the language offered. It’s clearly designed as a general purpose language, and its adoption mostly curtailed by this reputation.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#24So wasn't this part of the original dream for Smalltalk? Then this would seem to be coming full circle: Smalltalk, Objective C, Swift and back. I know some of you are Alan Kay fans so maybe you can comment on that aspect.
Given the heritage I’d also say it’s good to recognize the Actor model in Erlang/OTP and the overlap that has with Smalltalk and everything that followed.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#25Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#26I would name the "distributed" actor and func keyword "remote" instead. It's shorter and more understandable.
Even in traditional Actor model systems processes aren’t remote by default. They just allow you to reason about remote concurrency the same way you reason about it generally.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I skimmed through the blog post, and it seems to me that they are not claiming they invented something new, just that they are adding this to Swift language. (Distributed) actor model is nothing new, but I definitely wouldn't classify it as something that's common in other languages. To my knowledge Erlang/OTP is the only mainstream language where this is part of the standard library. There are implementations for ot…
They are adding features they 'took' to put it kindly from other existing, mature implementations without giving any credit or acknowledgement. Not only that, they expect people to test their beta grade software because they keep releasing it half baked ever since the release of Swift itself. It's embarrassing and it also angers me because these companies have wall gardened their ecosystems to proprietary languages a…
> without giving any credit or acknowledgement
You could be forgiven for not being familiar with the Actor model. But if you’re familiar with it, saying that isn’t recognition is bonkers. Everyone who knows what Actors are knows they’re referencing Erlang/OTP.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#28What's the TLDR on why this is a language feature vs a library?
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#29How does this compare to DCOM? (disclaimer, I've never used it)
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Konrad Malawski is a member of a team developing foundational server-side Swift libraries at Apple, with focus on distributed systems and concurrency
If I am not wrong he also worked on Akka, the distributed actors library for Scala.
No, you are not wrong: https://akka.io/team/
(check the Honorary Members section)