Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

Reactors

As we learned previously, event streams always propagate events on a single thread. This is useful from the standpoint of program comprehension, but we still need a way to express concurrency in our programs. In this section, we will see how to achieve concurrency by using entities called reactors.

A reactor is the basic unit of concurrency. While actors receive messages, we will adopt the terminology in which reactors receive events, in order to disambiguate. However, while an actor a in particular state has only a single point where it can receive a message, namely, the receive statement, a reactor can receive an event from many different sources at any time. Despite this flexibility, one reactor will always process, at most, one event ...