Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at what it takes to create a distributed computing system. The idea of using the Actor model / Actor pattern came up and it is a concept that seems to fit nicely. What is the Actor pattern then?
From Wikipedia, it’s described as such:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
Here’s another concise definition:
An actor object is used when you have a long running task and some code that needs to be executed after it completes. This kind of object is given the information it needs to perform the task and callbacks to execute when that task is done. The actor runs on its own thread without any further input and is destroyed when it is finished.
How does one go about implementing the actor pattern, though?