Actor Model outside Distributed Systems
- Author: Jorge Harrisonn Mantovanelli Thomes Vieira
- Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Paulo Roberto Miranda Meirelles
- Co-supervisor: David de Barros Tadokoro
Summary
In the beggining, networking was born and connected machines and people over distance. And the Actor Model emerged, providing a framework for distributed computation. And the 80s saw the rise of distributed systems, as resources were shared on networks. And Erlang was born, a language designed for distributed systems that embraced the Actor Model with each process behaving as an independent actor communicating with each other through messages.
This introduction was just to show how the Actor Model is closely related to distributed systems architecture. But what if is was not? What if someone build a local application using a distributed system paradigm? What would be better? What would be worse? These are the questions that this paper aims to respond to.
This work is about building a local application based of patch-hub in Rust using the Tokio async runtime. The architecture used will be based on the Actor Model but adapted to Rust/Tokio and patch-hub needs.
To give some more context: patch-hub is a terminal application that helps Linux Kernel developers review contributions, so it has little to no need for concurrency/parallelism. It will be used as the laboratory to test different approaches to reimplement it using the Actor Model.
Objectives
- Propose an architecture based on the Actor Model for local application
- Build a local application using the Actor Model using modern technologies (Rust)
- Examine it from an user perspective
- Examine it from a software engineering perspective