[ignoramous]

> ...we found that people familiar with the Actor Model actually expected something a bit different

I haven't done any programming with Actors per se but after skimming over its Wikipedia entry and other blog posts, Durable Objects does sound a lot like Actors to me.

Genuinely curious: What were some glaring differences that you were made aware of that led to not naming it Actors?

Thanks.

[kentonv]

So, this would be a better question for someone who has actually worked with other actor-model frameworks. But, one sense that I get is that in Erlang, there is a design philosophy where most actors are intentionally stateless so that if anything goes wrong they can die and be replaced easily.

So ironically it seems like many people expected statelessness to be a property, which is the opposite of what we were going for!

Disclaimer: I haven't worked with Erlang myself and I'm probably missing some nuance here. My background is in object-capability systems, which also commonly claim to be actor systems, and match what we're doing very closely.

[acarrera94]

Actors can be stateful and stateless, so this is a subset, and made serverless. Pretty cool! I get it, naming is hard and “serverless stateful actors” might have been too long of a name. Excited to check out this product.