Functional Programming with High Performance Actors
From the introduction:
But with current technologies we end up developing programs with an architecture specific to the problem at hand. And re-architect our programs as the requirements change. This is a labor-intensive approach that minimizes code reuse, particularly when using actors and refactoring method calls to be asynchronous messages or asynchronous messages become method calls. To maximize reuse, an actor should neither know nor care if the exchange of messages with another actor is synchronous or asynchronous. And if most message exchanges are synchronous, we can have many small actors working at a fairly low-level without slowing the program down to a crawl.
Another issue is flow control and its impact on throughput. Messaging is typically one-way, and takes extra effort to add flow control. But without some flow control, the systems we develop behave badly under load. Also, if you send one message at a time and do not proceed until a response is received, the throughput of most actor implementations will suffer a severe drop in throughput. What is needed is a messaging system which is more like method calls, while still having a reasonably high throughput rate.
I don’t think there is any doubt that hardware development has greatly out-stripped the ability to software to take full advantage of the additional processing power.
One possible paradigm shift may be extensive use of message passing.
Thoughts on how message passing can be applied to graph processing?