The animation on the Syndicated Actors home page [0] does a pretty good job of showing the difference, I think. Goblins is much more similar to the classic actor model shown at the beginning of the animation. The "syndicated" part, as far as I understand, relates to things like eventually consistent state sync being built-in as primitives. In Goblins, we provide the actor model (actually the vat model [1] like the E language) which can be used to build eventually consistent constructs on top. Recently we prototyped this using multi-user chat as a familiar example. [2]

[0] https://syndicate-lang.org/

[1] https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/T...

[2] https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-securit...

My 5 minute read is that the divergences are primarily in the communication model and in transactions:

- the SAM coordinates through the dataspace, whereas Goblins is focused on ("point-to-point") message passing

- SAM (as presented) doesn't contain a transactional semantics -- e.g. turns are atomic, and there's no rollback mechanism (I haven't been up to speed on recent work, I do wonder if this could be designed into SAM)

Yeah those interested in Wasm topics might find https://spritely.institute/hoot/ interesting. It's not only a Scheme compiler but a full Wasm toolchain available as a library.

The protocol is OCapN

http://ocapn.org/

We should have a FAQ! We get the Erlang question a lot. In short, Erlang actors are not capabilities because processes can be enumerated in Erlang. Capabilities require that the actors/processes have unforgeable/unguessable private addresses.

I still don't really understand what it's for, despite that it sounds interesting and gets linked here from time to time

but I think the difference is the "distributed" part, where I think they mean distributed over untrusted networks as opposed to distributed over nodes in a private cluster

Yep! Shepherd × Goblins

https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html

https://shepherding.services/