Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Communication Is Everything

As we saw in the last chapter, an actor program consists of independent, concurrently executing entities (called actors, or processes in Elixir) that communicate by sending each other messages. Each actor has a mailbox that stores messages until they’re handled.

A program using the communicating sequential processes model similarly consists of independent, concurrently executing entities that communicate by sending each other messages. The difference is one of emphasis—instead of focusing on the entities sending the messages, CSP focuses on the channels over which they are sent. Channels are first class—instead of each process being tightly coupled to a single mailbox, channels can be independently created, written ...