[erlang-questions] design pattern question for messaging

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@REDACTED
> wrote:

> This is the first I've heard of it.  Thanks for the pointers!
>
> Some interesting concepts - particularly the notion of persistent actors
> that never go away.
>

[Orleans...]

The thing about Orleans is frameworkizm. It provides you with a framework
where actors are persisted, dynamically spawned and so on. But by doing so,
it also trades off certain things. You can't (per CAP) guarantee an actor
will be run on once machine only. Thus, you have to resolve conflicts in
other ways, usually by having transactions in a subsystem somewhere. And
then using those transactions to lift safety into the system as a whole.
Imagine you run eventually consistent and asynchronous but once you do
something with money, you become strongly consistent by using a database
connection.

When I read the paper my guess was that you could build something like
Orleans in 2-3 weeks in Erlang tailored to your needs. Depending on the fit
of Orleans to your problem space this might be slower or faster than
understanding the framework in the first place.

I don't particularly like that you have to program in a certain mode of
operation in .NET for your code to be safe. While the same can be said for
Node.js or OCaml+Core.Async it is still not as safe as Erlang, where the
default mode of operation is the one you seek.



-- 
J.
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