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by tormeh 1985 days ago
The actor model is brilliant, but I fear it will never get the adoption it deserves because it's too much of a break from convention. I guess it's maybe a bit too much of a leap? It replaces both Kubernetes and messaging queues, so once you've made software with it it's kinda hard to back out to a vanilla programming model.

There's of course the legit downside of needing to use one language and one framework for all actors, which is a problem Kubernetes and a message queues don't have.
4 comments
halfmatthalfcat 1985 days ago
It doesn’t replace Kubernetes, it is the ultimate companion.

Kubernetes deals with the OS/node level failures, the actor system deals with the application level failures.

It’s actually amazing how complementary they are.

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lostcolony 1985 days ago
'legit downside of needing to use one language and one framework for all actors' - which is why a lot of Erlang users use it for coordination of messages, and delegate their handling to other services as needed.

That said, most work places I've been at, leadership has -wanted- to use one language. Even with containers and other decoupling technologies. So I don't know how much of a negative effect that downside has.

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blandflakes 1985 days ago
I've sort of come around in my career to aggressively simplifying the stack where possible... it's handy to be able to script stuff but I don't actually enjoy running a polyglot team. We get a lot more done with one language, one build tool, etc. I tend to save other languages for niche applications (e.g. Lua for nginx scripting).
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dragonwriter 1985 days ago
> There's of course the legit downside of needing to use one language and one framework for all actors

That's not inherent in the actor model, it's a potential artifact of some implementations. Though I think one VM is more common. E.g., BEAM instead of just Erlang, or JVM for Akka.

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aaronmill1 1985 days ago
How would the actor model replace Kubernetes?
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acjohnson55 1985 days ago
The way I see it, Kubernetes (with some type of message bus) is in some ways a system for deploying processes that will carry out process, kind of like actors. It doesn't use the same formalisms, but functionally, it's quite similar. Or, you could say that Akka Cluster is like Kubernetes, except that every process is contained within an Actor and has to be written in Java or Scala.
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