Yes believe it or not, the Actor model is forty years old. It has been invented in 1973 by Carl Hewitt and published in a paper authored by Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger.

The Actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats “actors” as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received.

Decoupling the sender from communications sent was a fundamental advance of the Actor model enabling asynchronous communication and control structures as patterns of passing messages.

Recipients of messages are identified by address, sometimes called “mailing address”. Thus an actor can only communicate with actors whose addresses it has. It can obtain those from a message it receives, or if the address is for an actor it has itself created.

The Actor model is characterized by inherent concurrency of computation within and among actors, dynamic creation of actors, inclusion of actor addresses in messages, and interaction only through direct asynchronous message passing with no restriction on message arrival order.

So it is time to wake up computer programmers ! Stop wasting time with threads and synchronization resulting in esoteric bugs like race conditions and dead-locks, even if you are able to use threads correctly they are heavyweight, inefficient and consume a lot of memory.