What's the difference of the Akka's Actor with Scala's Actor model

scala actor akka
Evans Y. picture Evans Y. · Feb 20, 2012 · Viewed 14.7k times · Source

I found there is also an Akka actor model, so I am wondering what's the difference between the Akka's Actor and Scala's Actor model?

Answer

Alexey Romanov picture Alexey Romanov · Feb 20, 2012

Well, there isn't. There is just Actor model, and Akka actors and Scala actors are two implementations of that model.

All Actor model says that your concurrency primitives are actors, which can:

  • receive a message and decide what to do next depending on the content of the message, including:

  • send messages to any actors they know about

  • create new actors

and provides certain guarantees, e.g.:

  • any actor will only handle a single message at a time

  • messages sent by actor X to actor Y will arrive in the order thay were sent

There is no difference between Scala and Akka actors on this level.

For differences in what they can do, see Different Scala Actor Implementations Overview. The biggest one, for me, is that Akka supports supervisors and ActorRegistry.

Related questions

When to use actors instead of messaging solutions such as WebSphere MQ or Tibco Rendezvous?

I've already read the question and answers to What design decisions would favour Scala's Actors instead of JMS?. Usually, we use messaging solutions which have existed for years already: either a JMS implementation such as WebSphere MQ or Apache ActiveMQ …

Read More
Akka in Scala, exclamation mark and question mark

What is the difference between exclamation mark (!) and question mark (?) when sending messages to Actors? myActor ! Hello(value1) myActor ? Hello(value1)

Read More
Difference between forward and tell in akka actors

What is a difference between tell and forward, in case I will send the same message: case msg: Message => otherActor tell (msg,sender) and case msg: Message => otherActor forward msg

Read More