SALSA has been developed since 1998 by Carlos A. Varela, who was a Ph.D. student directed by Gul Agha at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During the UIUC period, Gregory Haik, a student of Jean-Pierre Briot from the University of Paris 6, visiting Gul Agha's lab, made contributions to the transport layer of SALSA from versions 0.2 to 0.3.3. Carlos A. Varela founded the Worldwide Computing Laboratory and continued the development of SALSA when he became a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2001. Many of his students have participated in the SALSA project since then, including Wei-Jen Wang, Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Jason LaPorte, Abe Stephens, and Robin Toll. Abe Stephens and Travis Desell were the major contributors of SALSA 0.4 to 0.5. They worked together from 2001 until Abe Stephens graduated. Robin Toll also made contributions to the SALSA compiler during this period of time. During 2003 and 2004, Travis Desell worked on SALSA 0.6 and 0.7, which then became the foundation of SALSA 1.0. Advanced features such as message properties, name tokens, and join block continuations were introduced at that time. Wei-Jen Wang and Kaoutar El Maghraoui joined the SALSA project since 2003. Kaoutar El Maghraoui made major contributions to the development of the communication layer of the SALSA 0.7. Wei-Jen Wang has been a major developer since 2004. He made another major change on SALSA in 2004 and released SALSA 1.0 to 1.1.2 (the current release) in 2005 and 2006. He introduced actor garbage collection, fault-tolerance communication using persistent sockets and messages, actor name deletion support for naming services, and passing-by-value message delivery. Jason LaPorte joined the SALSA project in 2006. His contributions relate to the interface between SALSA and the OverView project. In 2007, Travis Desell redesigned SALSA from the ground up with performance and concurrency in mind, and named it SALSA Lite 2.0.