Introduction

The ChorusOS operating system offers a set of services for communicating between actors. Sharing memory between two actors to enable them to communicate was described in "Sharing Memory Between Two Actors". Other communication mechanisms can be split into two categories:

• Mechanisms which are said to be local: they do not enable actors running on different machines to communicate. The shared memory mechanism is one of these. You can use the system features in order to implement distributed shared memory. Message queues and local access points are other local communication mechanisms.

• Mechanisms which may be transparently used in a distributed way. The IPC service enables actors to exchange messages in a transparent fashion whether they are running on the same machine or not.