I talked with Professor Varela for about 45 minutes about the syntactic constructs and some implementation details that would go into building an Actor Library/DSL in Ruby and generally things look positive.

He liked my idea of using futures to pass the results of actor message invocations around (even though it means a fair bit more implementation work) and I think the syntax for the rest of the job should be pretty easy.

Score one for Ruby’s flexibility. I just hope that there’s some practical use for this sort of thing.