The biggest question I have about this: Is it really a good idea to make local actors and supervisor trees indistinguishable from remote ones?
Reusability is good.
Abstractions that are so "good" that they obscure potentially order-of-mag performance differences -- I'm not sold. Whether an actor is in-memory with me or across a TCP socket is order-of-mag, and may make the difference between whether my program satisfies is service goals, or fails them abjectly. Especially if that randomized latency happens a number of times, or in unpredictable places.
Error handling paths that have to account for the Two-Generals problem being indistinguishable from local errors I can be confident I'll hear about -- I'm not sold on that, either.
I'd be interested to hear rebuttals to those from folks who have worked deeply with OTP. Is it just... not that bad, in practice? Or are there parts of the abstraction that specifically help counter these concerns?
Reusability is good.
Abstractions that are so "good" that they obscure potentially order-of-mag performance differences -- I'm not sold. Whether an actor is in-memory with me or across a TCP socket is order-of-mag, and may make the difference between whether my program satisfies is service goals, or fails them abjectly. Especially if that randomized latency happens a number of times, or in unpredictable places.
Error handling paths that have to account for the Two-Generals problem being indistinguishable from local errors I can be confident I'll hear about -- I'm not sold on that, either.
I'd be interested to hear rebuttals to those from folks who have worked deeply with OTP. Is it just... not that bad, in practice? Or are there parts of the abstraction that specifically help counter these concerns?