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Welcome to Actors

Actors is a Julia library for concurrent computing based on the Actor Model:

An actor ... in response to a message it receives, can concurrently:

  • send a finite number of messages to other actors;
  • create a finite number of new actors;
  • designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives. [1]

Actors make concurrency easy to understand and reason about and integrate well with Julia's multi-threaded and distributed computing. Actors provides a modern API [2] for writing reactive [3] applications, that are:

  • responsive : react to inputs and events,
  • resilient : can cope with failures,
  • elastic : can distribute load over multiple threads and workers,
  • message-driven : rely on asynchronous message-passing.

Overview

This overview of Actors' documentation [4] will help you know where to look for certain things:

  • Tutorials will help you to learn how to work with actors. Start here if you’re new to Actors.
  • How-to guides are recipes. They guide you through the steps involved in addressing key problems and use-cases. They are more advanced than tutorials and assume some knowledge of how actors work.
  • On Actors discusses key concepts and provides background information and explanation.
  • Reference contains technical reference for APIs, some examples and internals. It assumes that you have a basic understanding of key concepts.