JuliaActors: a road to an Actors ecosystem

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For sure it can yet be improved.

But I don’t think this to be a very good idea for several reasons:

  • The biggest part in the library will be the messaging protocol if we come to the API functions, supervision … This stuff must remain together.
  • The core implementation of actor primitives (newLink, spawn, and the actor loop) is actually quite small and will not grow much.
  • This is also needed internally if we want Actors to provide a registry for all libraries using it. A registry is part of a modern actor API. It must be kept at a central place. Actors will therefore contain a registry server.
  • As far as I can see Actors will remain a small library: registry, error handling, grouping actors, monitors and the supervision tree are not very much code.
  • Sockets, TCP, … protocols with foreign actors can all be implemented by ecosystem libraries.

As @fborda mentioned infrastructure libraries will become more important than Actors itself. Actors will be a stepping stone for those.

But yes, even if the interface is already small, we should try to simplify it further. Thank you for keeping me thinking :grinning:.

BTW:

Those are all part of the messaging protocol. Explanation of the messaging protocol is still missing in the documentation. Func is needed to send and store functions and arguments.