It really does seem that any language which strives to become popular should at least ostensibly be object oriented. Scala does a nice job of combining OO and functional programming.

One message passing hack which could be useful for certain kinds of problems, would be to allow the transfer of a pointer from one process to another. This would avoid copying overhead.

In order to make this work, the processes should share their memory space and the compiler needs to ensure that the process which hands over the pointer does not use it again. The latter condition might be satisfiable using something like Clean’s uniqueness typing. Clean uses unique references to allow destructive updates in a functional environment.

All this being said, I still wonder whether it might just not be better to have shared nothing hardware architectures. That is, if there are eight cores, there should be eight memory banks, each of which is only directly accessible by one core.

Most software is ill adapted to this kind of architecture though. At least we have some good kernels, like Minix 3 to get started.

I know Termite can’t do it. It is possible to send a reference to object O from actor A to actor B with the effect that both can access and modify O and O may not be thread-safe.

A workaround is to make a deep copy with every message, but that may be tricky (list of file handlers) or costly (GBs of data).

Here’s a quick intro to it: http://theschemeway.blogspot.com/2007/04/introduction-to-termite.html

Anyone who hasn’t yet read his NSF Grant proposal should do so.

Also for readers unaware, read the about page for io It supports Actors

I believe it’s up in the air what the future of Javascript holds – but there *will* be something – it can either head in the CSP or Actors direction. A good post here.

I think that’s enough links for one comment.