Xiang Ji
Senior Backend Engineer @ Remote
Xiang writes Elixir at Remote. In his spare time, he loves tinkering and building stuff with functional programming languages, as well as learning new human languages and travelling. He occasionally blogs small and random things about programming at xiangji.me
Talk:
Comparing the Actor model and CSP concurrency with Elixir and Clojure
One big selling point of the BEAM VM is its from-the-ground-up implementation of the Actor model. CSP, another concurrency paradigm, has gained a lot of traction via Go, while also being embraced by Clojure. There is shared heritage between Elixir & Clojure, as well as between Actor model & CSP. However, radical differences between BEAM and JVM inevitably lead to intriguing divergences. You’ll gain a better understanding of these paradigms, and (hopefully) a bit more appreciation of what makes BEAM unique.
Talk objectives:
- Better understanding of the Actor model
- Better understanding of unique features of the BEAM VM (e.g. process memory space isolation, preemptive scheduling, soft real-time, independent generational garbage collection)
- Better understanding of CSP, of how concurrency challenges are approached in languages such as Go and Clojure.
- Better understanding of the similarities and differences between Elixir and Clojure.
- Better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the BEAM VM compared with other runtimes such as the JVM.
Target audience:
- People who could benefit from more knowledge of the BEAM VM, with which they can become better Elixir/Erlang developers.
- People who want to learn more about the characteristics of and differences between concurrency paradigms.
- People who are curious about Go’s/Clojure’s approach to concurrency.
- People who are curious about the contrast between Elixir and Clojure, the BEAM VM and the JVM.