Communicating Sequential Processes - Comparison With The Actor Model

Comparison With The Actor Model

In as much as it is concerned with concurrent processes that exchange messages, the Actor model is broadly similar to CSP. However, the two models make some fundamentally different choices with regard to the primitives they provide:

• CSP processes are anonymous, while actors have identities.

• CSP message-passing fundamentally involves a rendezvous between the processes involved in sending and receiving the message, i.e. the sender cannot transmit a message until the receiver is ready to accept it. In contrast, message-passing in actor systems is fundamentally asynchronous, i.e. message transmission and reception do not have to happen at same time, and senders may transmit messages before receivers are ready to accept them. These approaches may be considered duals of each other, in the sense that rendezvous-based systems can be used to construct buffered communications that behave as asynchronous messaging systems, while asynchronous systems can be used to construct rendezvous-style communications by using a message/acknowledgement protocol to synchronize senders and receivers.

• CSP uses explicit channels for message passing, whereas actor systems transmit messages to named destination actors. These approaches may also be considered duals of each other, in the sense that processes receiving through a single channel effectively have an identity corresponding to that channel, while the name-based coupling between actors may be broken by constructing actors that behave as channels.