I had a very interesting discussion with Sriram and Terrence (of Kilim and ANTLR fame, respectively—two smart dudes) yesterday. One of the things we talked about was adapting shared-memory data structures like concurrent hash maps into an actor setting.

One thing we’ve found when working on Servo is that the temptation to cheat is enormous. Most of the papers you read about things like parallel layout just assume a shared memory setting and blithely make use of data strutures like concurrent hash maps. There is nothing wrong with such data structures, but if we can avoid shared, mutable memory it will go a long way towards avoiding bugs I think—as well as keeping things secure. Even if the bug is mostly correct, data races and similar subtle errors can open holes for exploitation.