It wasn't strongly typed exactly, but Microsoft's DCOM protocol featured a simple distributed garbage collector that would automatically unref objects and allow them to be deallocated in some cases. DCOM allowed processes to send handles to (relatively for the time) strongly typed interfaces for objects across the network, in a form of PID that was recognised on a LAN and could be resolved back to the original object in the original process. It was called an OXID (object exporter ID), if I recall correctly.

It's not well known but what we now call the actor model was pretty widespread in Windows programming in the 1990s. Partly because Visual Basic was like JavaScript: single threaded runtime, no shared memory. To aid developers in exploiting parallelism and using blocking APIs you could create parallel "workers" to use JS terminology (apartments in MS speak), but Windows gave you object oriented RPC between the workers. So it was an RPC layer on top of message passing. You could do asynchronous RPCs if you wanted to:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/rpc/asynchron...

This was used to great effect in rather mundane programs like InstallShield, where the GUI ran in one worker and the install engine ran in an isolated (but in process) world, with the two communicating using RPCs/typed message passing.

That's what Pony was trying to do, but sadly it's lost most (all by now?) of its momentum.

Yeah I do still check in with Pony from time to time and it is still puffin along but it has lost most of its momentum. Imo it went to far in the classes direction for its objects and started to have a too complicated syntax, while still missing making some parts clear and easy to get that imo needs to be very clear in the syntax of a high performant language. Things like if a thing you create needs to be allocated or not. I have several times thought about implementing something Pony / actor model -like in zig or something, but without all the classes stuff.

Do you feel it's possible to achieve that while retaining the hot code loading mechanisms and flexible message handling that allows distributed systems to process versioned, legacy messages?

Thanks for contributing to the thread, Professor Hewitt.

Should be possible to achieve your goals. Researchers are working on prototypes.

You are very welcome!

As a fan of Elixir, I'd love to hear Jose Valim, Chris McCord or any of the other core devs to chime in on this subthread!