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by ryanmolden
5169 days ago
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You can do that, but as far as I know Erlang (not far, mind you) it takes care of a ton of details for you. For instance to send a message to another actor, whether they are on you machine or a remote machine you just need a PID (process identifier, an Erlang id concept similar to, but not the same as an OS level PID). In C++ you would either need to deal with local/remote differences in message transport (ignoring the non-trivial nature of serializing arbitrary types in C++) or create an abstraction that would do so on your behalf. Second, in Erlang all actors have their own heaps, so their local data is spatially close in memory by definition making actors NUMA/cache friendly (assuming the runtime is "doing it right") heap allocated data passed between actors in C++ wouldn't have that attribute by default (again, you could make it so with some effort, but it certainly isn't free). Third actors in Erlang don't use full OS level threads, so the overhead of spawning say 10k of them is not the overhead of spawning 10k C++ threads (also ignoring that C++ really only acknowledged the existence of threads in C++11). These are a few issues/benefits, but as I said you could do all of this in any language mostly, but in Erlang a lot of the gross/tricky details are already handled for you. |
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