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Kilim: Fast, lightweight, cheap message passing in Java.

Google TechTalks · 32.8K views · 2008-06-12 · 45:11

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Overview

A Google Tech Talk by the author of Kilim, a Java library for lightweight actor-style message passing. It argues that message passing can replace shared-memory concurrency and claims performance competitive with or better than Erlang for huge numbers of actors.

On Hacker News

Pointed to as evidence that Java can do fast, cheap message-passing concurrency, as an alternative to Erlang or Scala actors.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2009–2012

Topics

Distributed systemsSoftware performance & optimizationFunctional programming
Search by tags
kilimactorsjavaerlangjvm concurrency

What people said

lucifer · 2010-02 · Recommendation

"Asynchronious message passing is old and great idea. Instead of synchronizing objects and dealing with deadlocks we try to isolate objects and let them exchange messages. Erlang proved it to be extremly powerful tool applicable to wide range of highly scalable mission critical applications. In JVM landscape big interest to this approach started after introducing Scala actors. " That statement is so very poorly informed! JMS ("surprise"?) has been a sign of "interest" in "Asynchronious message passing" in the "JVM landscape". I am not up on my Scala, but the author fails to convey (based on what I do know ;) the competence level that would lend weight to his attempt to address (much less support) the topic. For those interested in other JVM alternatives, Kilim seems quite promising and seems to hold its own quite well in benchmarks against Erlang. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [scroll to end to see the impressive results for Kilim.] [LINK] [edit: added pdf link]

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wynand · 2009-10 · Recommendation

Actors are decoupled from the means by which they are executed. Scala has a nice system where you can run thousands of event-based actors in a thread pool. It grows the pool as needed (as threads block). See [LINK] While it may use threads, Scala's actor system effectively allows you to create thousands of actors. Kilim is actually a pure (depending on whether you see a byte-code processing system as pure) Java system that does the same thing (as far as I can tell): [LINK] Kilim's author did a nice Google Talk: [VIDEO] EDIT: Fixed some grammar and added video link.

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eternalban · 2012-04 · Reference

Erlang is a CSP system, first and foremost, and not actors. [CSP style concurrency on JVM]: [VIDEO] (Kilim, it should be noted, was benchmarked as scaling better than Erlang/OTP.) [LINK] (paper in top comment is worth the read.) Disclaimer: I think Erlang/OTP rocks. But JVM has its moments, as well, and in fairness has earned the "most advanced VM" title.

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Sources

Video by Google TechTalks, played through YouTube.

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