Actor frameworks for the JVM platform: a comparative analysis

Abstract

The problem of programming scalable multicore processors has renewed interest in message-passing languages and frameworks. Such languages and frameworks are typically actor-oriented, implementing some variant of the standard Actor semantics. This paper analyzes some of the more significant efforts to build actor-oriented frameworks for the JVM platform. It compares the frameworks in terms of their execution semantics, the communication and synchronization abstractions provided, and the representations used in the implementations. It analyzes the performance of actor-oriented frameworks to determine the costs of supporting different actor properties on JVM. The analysis suggests that with suitable optimizations, standard Actor semantics and some useful communication and synchronization abstractions may be supported with reasonable efficiency on the JVM platform.