Some background:
In Verona, we have a generalisation of the actor model, which makes things like two-phase commit easy but makes this problem worse: the equivalent of a message is 'sent' to multiple concurrent owners (generalised actors), so working out who to wake to reduce the total number of messages in the system is hard.
We looked at what a version for embedded devices would look like, but even the actor-model subset is basically impossible. Even simple actor model has things with fan-out, so waking up an actor because its queue is full may cause two more messages to be sent. And these may be in cycles.
And actor model (and BoC) don't provide good tools for reasoning about the worst-case numbers.
