Is there a programming language where every function is essentially run as a separate actor?

Question

Is there a programming language where you don't have to define actors yourself - every function is just ran as a separate actor (which can mean a separate thread if there are free cores available) by default?

For example it means that if I write something as simple as

v = fA(x) + fB(y)

then fA and fB could be calculated simultaneously before the sum of their results was assigned to v.

Answer 1

I don't think there is anything this extreme, since the context switching and comunication overhead would be too big.

The closest I can think of to what you are asking is data-parallel programing, where the program is mostly written in the same style as a sequential version but parts of it are ran in parallel where possible.

Examples are loop vectorization in Fortran and "par" magic in Haskell.

Answer 2

Haskell's par combinator lets you evaluate expressions concurrently (which can mean in separate threads if there are free cores available). All you have to do is:

x `par` y

Which will evaluate x and y concurrently, and return the value of y . Note that x and y can be programs of arbitrary complexity.

Answer 3

Joule is a pure asynchronous message passing language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_%28programming_language%29

http://www.erights.org/history/joule/MANUAL.BK5.pdf

ActorScript is a pure Actor message-passing language, but appears to only exist as a specification:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.2748