Dataflow programming vs Actor model

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18790385

  •  28-06-2022
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Question

How can the difference between 'Dataflow Programming' and 'Actor model' be described? As far as I understand, they are not unrelated but yet are not the same. Is DF a wider concept, which gist is the distinction from Control Flow model, while the Actor model is more elaborated and theoretically grounded inheritor of DF?

Was it helpful?

Solution

  • Dataflow is deterministic which allows parallelism.
  • Actors are non-deterministic which allows concurrency.

OTHER TIPS

DF is wider. A DF node may have several input ports, and is fired when all inputs are set. An Actor is a DF node with single input port. Colored Petri Net is even wider, allowing several transitions to be fed from single place, but it is hard to implement.

A DF implementation in Java can be found at Dataflow4Java.

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