It would be pretty simple conceptually (maybe not practically) to make node.js work in an actor-like way, here's a piece of toy code I wrote that does it for JS (not node, but no reason the same couldn't be done for node):
http://blog.ometer.com/2010/11/28/a-sequential-actor-like-ap...
By "actor-like way" here I just mean a code module ("actor") sees one thread (at a time), and the runtime takes care of the details of scheduling threads when a module has an event/message/request to process. Also I guess avoiding callbacks. But you could be more Erlang-ish/Akka-ish in more details if you wanted.
node.js punts this to the app developer to instead run a herd of processes. In most cases that's probably fine, but in theory with one process and many threads, the runtime can do a better job saturating the CPU cores because it can move actors among the threads rather than waiting for the single-threaded process an actor happens to be in to become free. The practical situations where this comes up, I admit, are probably not that numerous as long as you never use blocking IO and are basically IO-bound. (Only CPU-intensive stuff would cause a problem.)
By "actor-like way" here I just mean a code module ("actor") sees one thread (at a time), and the runtime takes care of the details of scheduling threads when a module has an event/message/request to process. Also I guess avoiding callbacks. But you could be more Erlang-ish/Akka-ish in more details if you wanted.
node.js punts this to the app developer to instead run a herd of processes. In most cases that's probably fine, but in theory with one process and many threads, the runtime can do a better job saturating the CPU cores because it can move actors among the threads rather than waiting for the single-threaded process an actor happens to be in to become free. The practical situations where this comes up, I admit, are probably not that numerous as long as you never use blocking IO and are basically IO-bound. (Only CPU-intensive stuff would cause a problem.)
btw this has been hashed out to death on the node.js list: http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...