Threading is the most common approach to concurrency deployed in modern languages (such as Java or C#). In this model, multiple threads compete for access to shared data and, as a result, an object’s state may change at any moment without warning — leading to complex and hard to diagnose race conditions.
An alternative approach to concurrent computation is the Actor model. Whiley implements the actor model using syntax which treats methods and functions differently. Every method acts on a given actor, and represents a specific message that can be sent to that actor. Thus, methods in Whiley are similar those in traditional object-oriented languages (e.g. Java) which have an explicit receiver, and may have side-effects. In contrast, functions in Whiley are pure (i.e. side-effect free) and not associated with any actor. Methods are either synchronous (and return a value), or asychronous (and do not).
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