[Lethalman]

Stopped being interested after reading "It's deadlock free!", "because Pony has no locks at all"... yeah but actor X waiting for actor Y which waits for actor X is a deadlock. It's not a matter of lock primitives, it's a matter of software. (yes, x-comment from reddit)

[n3otec]

No. If actor X is waiting for actor Y and Y for X and neither of the two has messages to process, they are potentially subject to GC.

The question is, what does X is waiting for Y mean? 'Waiting' would imply that there are language constructs to actually wait. Pony doesn't have that. An actor that is blocked (i.e. has no messages) and that satisfies necessary RC invariants will be collected.

[Lethalman]

So I haven't seen yet in the website a code sample showing how a simple ping-pong actors would communicate, so I can't even test quickly if this is possible with the language.

If the program can implement a lock between the two actors, then your language is not deadlock free. Even a loop by checking if some variable has changed by the other actor (if possible in this language, I still don't even know by the deep lack of examples), and the other actor doing the same thing, that can be claimed as deadlock.

[tright]

The lack of actor examples in the documentation for an actor-based language is really surprising.

Anyway, there is only a send construct (essentially a remote procedure call that returns no value) but no receive construct. Here's an example of passing data in a ring: https://github.com/CausalityLtd/ponyc/blob/master/examples/r...

As there is no blocking receive, no immediate way of breaking this came to my mind, although I had the same initial thought.