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Agreed, although it’s not always fire-and-forget (i.e. send a message and don’t wait for a response). Actors generally do support request/response style messaging, but it’s always async - it’s really only synchronous request/response communication that’s not allowed.

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Not always. Goblins[0] is an example of an actor system that supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication between actors, with synchronous communication only possible if both actors are in the same “vat” (a kind of event loop).

[0] https://docs.racket-lang.org/goblins/

Hi! Yeah I'm the author of Goblins :)

Yes, Goblins' "vat" model descends from E, which supports the "hybrid worldview". http://www.erights.org/

I have a tendency to call Goblins objects "actors", though some people in the community like to point out that "distributed object" is preferable since synchronous call/return is not supported in actors. But yeah.

> Agreed, although it’s not always fire-and-forget (i.e. send a message and don’t wait for a response).

Sure, you can do async request/response in the actor model, but the low-level basic mechanism all communication is built on is send a message to an actor mailbox and keep going. Everything else is built in top of that.

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