Hands-On Software Architecture with Golang

The Actor model

A specific variant of EDA is called the Actor model. Here, Actors refer to services that do the following:

• Abstract the level, which indicates a primitive unit of computation
• Encapsulate state

These Actors have mailboxes, where messages can be posted. The Actor sequentially takes each message from the mailbox and performs an action corresponding to the message. Each Actor has also some internal state that can affect the response to the messages.

Of course, there is more than one Actor and they communicate with each other asynchronously using messages. The overall system behavior is defined by these interactions and the processing by the Actors.

There are differences between this and the channel-goroutine semantics:

• Each ...