Towards benchmarking actor- and agent-based programming languages

Abstract

Over the past few years there have been several advances in distributed systems, and more recently multi-core processors. Consequently, a natural need for concurrent and parallel programming languages arises. In this paper, we compare some aspects of two concurrency models, Actors and Agents, using benchmarks to evaluate: (i) the communication performance on a concurrency-heavy scenario; (ii) the performance in a scenario with the presence of bottleneck and synchronization problems; and (iii) the reactivity and fairness of the models. We chose Jason, 2APL, and GOAL as the agent-oriented programming languages and Erlang, Akka, and ActorFoundry as the actor-oriented programming languages. Overall, Erlang displayed the best performance of all languages used in this comparison, followed by ActorFoundry, Akka, Jason, 2APL, and GOAL, in this particular order.