Comment by evomassiny 5 days ago
An interesting project, but it seems to be in its infancy :) I definitely want an actor based language to play with, and something with a strong type system would be perfect. gleam [1] and inko [2] look promising in this regard
fundamentally I think though is that for distributed systems you don't really want actors, you want ~erlang processes. The distinction being around how errors propagate between processes, and various mechanisms to deal with that. The actor model doesn't have any of that in its theoretical basis. Because in a distributed system you fundamentally have unpredictable errors, and generally erlang tries to shoehorn you into a programming style where you're ok with faults, which makes your system more fault tolerant.
The core philosophical problem with gleam is that it is trying to get rid of errors. Ok, well good luck with that.
I've been meaning to get to know gleam better, so I'm interested in your comment.
Do you mean that the error handling of an Erlang process is in any way diminished by using gleam? Or is it just that maybe it's unnecessary work to try so hard to prevent errors which you've already put so much into tolerating?
Another less-known actor based language is pony [0], it is well documented and made some uncommon choices.
[0] https://www.ponylang.io/