The Actor Model and Message-Passing

I’m sure people who have been following me and talking to me have noticed how I’ve been looking so much into actor/agent-based concurrency and message-passing – how I’ve been talking about Axum, TPL Dataflow, Erlang, and some of my homebrewn equivalents. I believe the future of concurrency lies in message-passing. My reason for saying this [...]

Axum: More Immutability

This time, I’ll cover functions in schemas, channels, and agents. This will be a relatively short post, as there isn’t a lot to cover, and the concepts are easily understood. I mentioned several times in my Rand48 post that schemas, channels, and agents can have functions. I’ll cover that here. But, first, schema rules. These [...]

Axum: The Enhanced C# 3.0 Compiler

Axum ships with an enhanced C# 3.0 compiler, which has support for certain Axum concepts – namely isolation and immutability. This compiler is necessary, because having separate C# projects with safety annotations is not always very convenient, plus, these annotations are not actually verified. The Axum C# 3.0 compiler can verify that classes/methods marked with [...]

Axum: Dataflow Networks

As per request on Twitter, this time we’ll explore what Axum’s dataflow networks can do for us. Dataflow, in its simplest form, is the process of data passing through a set of points that act upon or transform the data. Points only run when data actually passes through, meaning that we can declaratively set up [...]

Axum: Introduction + Rand48 Example

Okay, so it’s been almost a year since I said I’d write some blog posts about Axum in a few days/weeks… I never have been good at keeping to a schedule, which is very obvious here. However, since I’m finally about to use Axum to write a scalable server architecture, it’s about time I start [...]

Quick Intro: Microsoft Axum

This is just a quick introduction to Microsoft’s upcoming Axum programming language before I go to sleep. Short description: Axum uses agents (which “implement” channels) to execute tasks concurrently and independently, passing messages back and forth. The whole idea behind Axum is isolation, so that minimal synchronization is required, and to avoid data races (and [...]