JuliaActors: a road to an Actors ecosystem

[pbayer]

For sure it can yet be improved.

@tisztamo

Moving the interface to its own package would be very helpful …

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.

@fborda

Stuff like Akka HTTP, Akka Streams, Erlang Term Storage/Mnesia, Phoenix PubSub are all tools that I really think would really complement Julia’s current strengths.

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 .

BTW:

@tisztamo

The status of Func , Call , Request and Response is not clear at first sight

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.