pavel.baravik
pavel.baravik

Reputation: 709

Dataflow programming vs Actor model

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?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3799

Answers (2)

Alexei Kaigorodov
Alexei Kaigorodov

Reputation: 13535

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.

Upvotes: 4

Jonas Bonér
Jonas Bonér

Reputation: 421

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

Upvotes: 14

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