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Key Principles of the Actor Model
- Actors: The basic building blocks, encapsulating state and behavior, like lightweight objects.
- Asynchronous Messaging: Actors communicate by sending messages (like texts) to each other's mailboxes; senders don't wait for replies.
- Mailbox: Each actor has a queue (mailbox) for incoming messages, ensuring sequential processing and preventing race conditions.
- State Encapsulation: An actor's internal state is private and can only be modified by the actor itself in response to a message.
- No Shared State: Actors don't share memory; they communicate indirectly, eliminating complex locking mechanisms.
- Actor Capabilities: Upon receiving a message, an actor can:
- Modify its internal state.
- Create new actors.
- Send messages to other actors.
- Decide how to process the next message.
Why Use the Actor Model?
- Concurrency & Parallelism: Easily handles many tasks at once by distributing them among actors.
- Scalability: Actors can run across multiple cores, CPUs, or machines, scaling with resources.
- Fault Tolerance: Allows for self-healing systems through supervision, where parent actors can restart or handle failures of child actors.
- Simplified State Management: Avoids shared mutable state, reducing bugs common in traditional multithreaded programming.
Examples & Implementations
- Frameworks: Akka (Scala/Java), Elixir/Erlang, Orleans (.NET) are popular implementations.
- Use Cases: Real-time systems, distributed databases, web servers, and complex event processing.
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Actor model
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Actor_model
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Actor_model
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats an actor as the basic building block of concurrent ...Read more
The Actor model
Stately.ai
https://stately.ai › docs › actor-model
Stately.ai
https://stately.ai › docs › actor-model
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation in which an “actor” is the basic building block.Read more
How the Actor Model works by example
The Server Side
https://www.theserverside.com › blog › How-the-Actor-...
The Server Side
https://www.theserverside.com › blog › How-the-Actor-...
6 Dec 2023 — The Actor Model is a style of software architecture in which the basic computational unit is called an actor.Read more
How the Actor Model Meets the Needs of Modern ...
Akka Documentation
https://doc.akka.io › typed › guide › actors-intro
Akka Documentation
https://doc.akka.io › typed › guide › actors-intro
2 Oct 2015 — The actor model abstraction allows you to think about your code in terms of communication, not unlike the exchanges that occur between people ...Read more
Actor Model in Distributed Systems
GeeksforGeeks
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org › system-design › actor-...
GeeksforGeeks
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org › system-design › actor-...
23 Jul 2025 — Location Transparency: The Actor Model abstracts the location of actors, meaning that actors can be distributed across different machines ...Read more
Videos
10 key moments in this video
10 key moments in this video
The actor model in 10 minutes
Brian Storti
https://www.brianstorti.com › the-actor-model
Brian Storti
https://www.brianstorti.com › the-actor-model
9 Jul 2015 — The actor model is a conceptual model to deal with concurrent computation. It defines some general rules for how the system's components should behave and ...Read more
When to Use the Actor Model in Software Development
Medium · Archana Goyal
30+ likes · 1 year ago
Medium · Archana Goyal
30+ likes · 1 year ago
The actor model provides a solid foundation for applications that require high concurrency, fault tolerance, and efficient message-driven communication.Read more
5.4 Actor-based Concurrency
GitHub Pages documentation
https://berb.github.io › original › 054_actors
GitHub Pages documentation
https://berb.github.io › original › 054_actors
The fundamental idea of the actor model is to use actors as concurrent primitives that can act upon receiving messages in different ways.Read more
Actor Model Overview
DEV Community
https://dev.to › actor-dev › actor-model-overview-5fd3
DEV Community
https://dev.to › actor-dev › actor-model-overview-5fd3
4 Feb 2025 — The Actor Model is one of the most interesting models I've seen so far. It's designed for high concurrency, scalability and fault tolerance.Read more
Actor model
Programming paradigm
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats an actor as the basic building block of concurrent computation.
Source:Wikipedia