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[return to "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation [pdf] (1985)"]
1. dzonga+3e1[view] [source] 2026-02-02 13:39:15
>>kioku+(OP)
> It is generally believed that the next generation of computers will involve massively parallel architectures.

To this day - we have only taken advantage of parallel architectures in GPUs - a lot of software still runs on single CPU threads. most programming languages- are made optimized for single threads - yeah we might have threads, virtual threads, fibers etc - but how many people are using those on a daily basis?

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2. throwa+lP3[view] [source] 2026-02-03 03:04:59
>>dzonga+3e1
I will be glad to be wrong about, but…

I was under the impression that parallel and concurrent code was the dominant paradigm for programming tasks currently going in most of the semi-mainstream domains. I am certainly willing to concede that I could just be in a bubble that thinks about and designs for concurrency and parallelism as a first class concern, but it doesn’t seem that way.

I mean one of the large features/touted benefits for Rust is the single mutable XOR multiple immutable semantics explicitly to assist with problems in parallel/concurrent code, all of the OTP languages are built on top of a ridiculously parallel and distributed first ‘VM’. It strikes me as peculiar that these types of languages and ecosystems would be so, apparently, popular if the primary use case of ‘safe’/resilient parallel/concurrent code was not a large concern.

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