Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

Let me first say that I have quite a lot of Java experience, but have only recently become interested in functional languages. Recently I've started looking at Scala, which seems like a very nice language. However, I've been reading about Scala's Actor framework in Programming in Scala , and there's one thing I don't understand. In chapter 30.4 it says that using react instead of receive makes it possible to re-use threads, which is good for performance, since threads are expensive in the JVM. Does this mean that, as long as I remember to call react instead of receive , I can start as many Actors as I like? Before discovering Scala, I've been playing with Erlang, and the author of Programming Erlang boasts about spawning over 200,000 processes without breaking a sweat. I'd hate to do that with Java threads. What kind of limits am I looking at in Scala as compared to Erlang (and Java)? Also, how does this thread re-use work in Scala? Let's assume, for simplicity, that I have only one thread. Will all the actors that I start run sequentially in this thread, or will some sort of task-switching take place? For example, if I start two actors that ping-pong messages to each other, will I risk deadlock if they're started in the same thread? According to Programming in Scala , writing actors to use react is more difficult than with receive . This sounds plausible, since react doesn't return. However, the book goes on to show how you can put a react inside a loop using Actor.loop . As a result, you get loop { react { ... } } which, to me, seems pretty similar to while (true

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel