Mixing metaphors: Actors as channels and channels as actors

Channel- and actor-based programming languages are both used in practice, but the two are often confused. Languages such as Go provide anonymous processes which communicate using buffers or rendezvous points-known as channels-while languages such as Erlang provide addressable processes-known as actors-each with a single incoming message queue. The lack of a common representation makes it difficult to reason about translations that exist in the folklore. We define a calculus λ_ch for typed asynchronous channels, and a calculus λ_act for typed actors. We define translations from λ_act into λ_ch and λ_ch into λ_act and prove that both are type- and semanticspreserving. We show that our approach accounts for synchronisation and selective receive in actor systems and discuss future extensions to support guarded choice and behavioural types.