Dataflow programming vs Actor model

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.