Is Scala's actors similar to Go's coroutines?

Question

If I wanted to port a Go library that uses Goroutines, would Scala be a good choice because its inbox/akka framework is similar in nature to coroutines?

Answer 1

Nope, they're not. Goroutines are based on the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes, as specified by Tony Hoare in 1978. The idea is that there can be two processes or threads that act independently of one another but share a "channel," which one process/thread puts data into and the other process/thread consumes. The most prominent implementations you'll find are Go's channels and Clojure's core.async, but at this time they are limited to the current runtime and cannot be distributed, even between two runtimes on the same physical box.

CSP evolved to include a static, formal process algebra for proving the existence of deadlocks in code. This is a really nice feature, but neither Goroutines nor core.async currently support it. If and when they do, it will be extremely nice to know before running your code whether or not a deadlock is possible. However, CSP does not support fault tolerance in a meaningful way, so you as the developer have to figure out how to handle failure that can occur on both sides of channels, and such logic ends up getting strewn about all over the application.

Actors, as specified by Carl Hewitt in 1973, involve entities that have their own mailbox. They are asynchronous by nature, and have location transparency that spans runtimes and machines - if you have a reference (Akka) or PID (Erlang) of an actor, you can message it. This is also where some people find fault in Actor-based implementations, in that you have to have a reference to the other actor in order to send it a message, thus coupling the sender and receiver directly. In the CSP model, the channel is shared, and can be shared by multiple producers and consumers. In my experience, this has not been much of an issue. I like the idea of proxy references that mean my code is not littered with implementation details of how to send the message - I just send one, and wherever the actor is located, it receives it. If that node goes down and the actor is reincarnated elsewhere, it's theoretically transparent to me.

Actors have another very nice feature - fault tolerance. By organizing actors into a supervision hierarchy per the OTP specification devised in Erlang, you can build a domain of failure into your application. Just like value classes/DTOs/whatever you want to call them, you can model failure, how it should be handled and at what level of the hierarchy. This is very powerful, as you have very little failure handling capabilities inside of CSP.

Actors are also a concurrency paradigm, where the actor can have mutable state inside of it and a guarantee of no multithreaded access to the state, unless the developer building an actor-based system accidentally introduces it, for example by registering the Actor as a listener for a callback, or going asynchronous inside the actor via Futures.

Shameless plug - I'm writing a new book with the head of the Akka team, Roland Kuhn, called Reactive Design Patterns where we discuss all of this and more. Green threads, CSP, event loops, Iteratees, Reactive Extensions, Actors, Futures/Promises, etc. Expect to see a MEAP on Manning by early next month.

Good luck!

Answer 2

There are two questions here:

• Is Scala a good choice to port goroutines?

This is an easy question, since Scala is a general purpose language, which is no worse or better than many others you can choose to "port goroutines".

There are of course many opinions on why Scala is better or worse as a language (e.g. here is mine), but these are just opinions, and don't let them stop you. Since Scala is general purpose, it "pretty much" comes down to: everything you can do in language X, you can do in Scala. If it sounds too broad.. how about continuations in Java :)

• Are Scala actors similar to goroutines?

The only similarity (aside the nitpicking) is they both have to do with concurrency and message passing. But that is where the similarity ends.

Since Jamie's answer gave a good overview of Scala actors, I'll focus more on Goroutines/core.async, but with some actor model intro.

Actors help things to be "worry free distributed"

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Where a "worry free" piece is usually associated with terms such as: fault tolerance, resiliency, availability, etc..

Without going into grave details how actors work, in two simple terms actors have to do with:

• Locality: each actor has an address/reference that other actors can use to send messages to
• Behavior: a function that gets applied/called when the message arrives to an actor

Think "talking processes" where each process has a reference and a function that gets called when a message arrives.

There is much more to it of course (e.g. check out Erlang OTP, or akka docs), but the above two is a good start.

Where it gets interesting with actors is.. implementation. Two big ones, at the moment, are Erlang OTP and Scala AKKA. While they both aim to solve the same thing, there are some differences. Let's look at a couple:

• I intentionally do not use lingo such as "referential transparency", "idempotence", etc.. they do no good besides causing confusion, so let's just talk about immutability [a can't change that concept]. Erlang as a language is opinionated, and it leans towards strong immutability, while in Scala it is too easy to make actors that change/mutate their state when a message is received. It is not recommended, but mutability in Scala is right there in front of you, and people do use it.

• Another interesting point that Joe Armstrong talks about is the fact that Scala/AKKA is limited by the JVM which just wasn't really designed with "being distributed" in mind, while Erlang VM was. It has to do with many things such as: process isolation, per process vs. the whole VM garbage collection, class loading, process scheduling and others.

The point of the above is not to say that one is better than the other, but it's to show that purity of the actor model as a concept depends on its implementation.

Now to goroutines..

Goroutines help to reason about concurrency sequentially

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As other answers already mentioned, goroutines take roots in Communicating Sequential Processes, which is a "formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems", which by definition can mean pretty much anything :)

I am going to give examples based on core.async, since I know internals of it better than Goroutines. But core.async was built after the Goroutines/CSP model, so there should not be too many differences conceptually.

The main concurrency primitive in core.async/Goroutine is a channel. Think about a channel as a "queue on rocks". This channel is used to "pass" messages. Any process that would like to "participate in a game" creates or gets a reference to a channel and puts/takes (e.g. sends/receives) messages to/from it.

Free 24 hour Parking

Most of work that is done on channels usually happens inside a "Goroutine" or "go block", which "takes its body and examines it for any channel operations. It will turn the body into a state machine. Upon reaching any blocking operation, the state machine will be 'parked' and the actual thread of control will be released. This approach is similar to that used in C# async. When the blocking operation completes, the code will be resumed (on a thread-pool thread, or the sole thread in a JS VM)" (source).

It is a lot easier to convey with a visual. Here is what a blocking IO execution looks like:

You can see that threads mostly spend time waiting for work. Here is the same work but done via "Goroutine"/"go block" approach:

Here 2 threads did all the work, that 4 threads did in a blocking approach, while taking the same amount of time.

The kicker in above description is: "threads are parked" when they have no work, which means, their state gets "offloaded" to a state machine, and the actual live JVM thread is free to do other work (source for a great visual)

note: in core.async, channel can be used outside of "go block"s, which will be backed by a JVM thread without parking ability: e.g. if it blocks, it blocks the real thread.

Power of a Go Channel

Another huge thing in "Goroutines"/"go blocks" is operations that can be performed on a channel. For example, a timeout channel can be created, which will close in X milliseconds. Or select/alt! function that, when used in conjunction with many channels, works like a "are you ready" polling mechanism across different channels. Think about it as a socket selector in non blocking IO. Here is an example of using timeout channel and alt! together:

(defn race [q]
  (searching [:.yahoo :.google :.bing])
  (let [t (timeout timeout-ms)
        start (now)]
    (go
      (alt! 
        (GET (str "/yahoo?q=" q))  ([v] (winner :.yahoo v (took start)))
        (GET (str "/bing?q=" q))   ([v] (winner :.bing v (took start)))
        (GET (str "/google?q=" q)) ([v] (winner :.google v (took start)))
        t                          ([v] (show-timeout timeout-ms))))))

This code snippet is taken from wracer, where it sends the same request to all three: Yahoo, Bing and Google, and returns a result from the fastest one, or times out (returns a timeout message) if none returned within a given time. Clojure may not be your first language, but you can't disagree on how sequential this implementation of concurrency looks and feels.

You can also merge/fan-in/fan-out data from/to many channels, map/reduce/filter/... channels data and more. Channels are also first class citizens: you can pass a channel to a channel..

Go UI Go!

Since core.async "go blocks" has this ability to "park" execution state, and have a very sequential "look and feel" when dealing with concurrency, how about JavaScript? There is no concurrency in JavaScript, since there is only one thread, right? And the way concurrency is mimicked is via 1024 callbacks.

But it does not have to be this way. The above example from wracer is in fact written in ClojureScript that compiles down to JavaScript. Yes, it will work on the server with many threads and/or in a browser: the code can stay the same.

Goroutines vs. core.async

Again, a couple of implementation differences [there are more] to underline the fact that theoretical concept is not exactly one to one in practice:

• In Go, a channel is typed, in core.async it is not: e.g. in core.async you can put messages of any type on the same channel.
• In Go, you can put mutable things on a channel. It is not recommended, but you can. In core.async, by Clojure design, all data structures are immutable, hence data inside channels feels a lot safer for its wellbeing.

So what's the verdict?

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I hope the above shed some light on differences between the actor model and CSP.

Not to cause a flame war, but to give you yet another perspective of let's say Rich Hickey:

"I remain unenthusiastic about actors. They still couple the producer with the consumer. Yes, one can emulate or implement certain kinds of queues with actors (and, notably, people often do), but since any actor mechanism already incorporates a queue, it seems evident that queues are more primitive. It should be noted that Clojure's mechanisms for concurrent use of state remain viable, and channels are oriented towards the flow aspects of a system."(source)

However, in practice, Whatsapp is based on Erlang OTP, and it seemed to sell pretty well.

Another interesting quote is from Rob Pike:

"Buffered sends are not confirmed to the sender and can take arbitrarily long. Buffered channels and goroutines are very close to the actor model.

The real difference between the actor model and Go is that channels are first-class citizens. Also important: they are indirect, like file descriptors rather than file names, permitting styles of concurrency that are not as easily expressed in the actor model. There are also cases in which the reverse is true; I am not making a value judgement. In theory the models are equivalent."(source)

Answer 3

Moving some of my comments to an answer. It was getting too long :D (Not to take away from jamie and tolitius's posts; they're both very useful answers.)

It isn't quite true that you could do the exact same things that you do with goroutines in Akka. Go channels are often used as synchronization points. You cannot reproduce that directly in Akka. In Akka, post-sync processing has to be moved into a separate handler ("strewn" in jamie's words :D). I'd say the design patterns are different. You can kick off a goroutine with a chan, do some stuff, and then <- to wait for it to finish before moving on. Akka has a less-powerful form of this with ask, but ask isn't really the Akka way IMO.

Chans are also typed, while mailboxes are not. That's a big deal IMO, and it's pretty shocking for a Scala-based system. I understand that become is hard to implement with typed messages, but maybe that indicates that become isn't very Scala-like. I could say that about Akka generally. It often feels like its own thing that happens to run on Scala. Goroutines are a key reason Go exists.

Don't get me wrong; I like the actor model a lot, and I generally like Akka and find it pleasant to work in. I also generally like Go (I find Scala beautiful, while I find Go merely useful; but it is quite useful).

But fault tolerance is really the point of Akka IMO. You happen to get concurrency with that. Concurrency is the heart of goroutines. Fault-tolerance is a separate thing in Go, delegated to defer and recover, which can be used to implement quite a bit of fault tolerance. Akka's fault tolerance is more formal and feature-rich, but it can also be a bit more complicated.

All said, despite having some passing similarities, Akka is not a superset of Go, and they have significant divergence in features. Akka and Go are quite different in how they encourage you to approach problems, and things that are easy in one, are awkward, impractical, or at least non-idiomatic in the other. And that's the key differentiators in any system.

So bringing it back to your actual question: I would strongly recommend rethinking the Go interface before bringing it to Scala or Akka (which are also quite different things IMO). Make sure you're doing it the way your target environment means to do things. A straight port of a complicated Go library is likely to not fit in well with either environment.