Calculon

Design notes for a C# actor framework

Actors

Actors have a type and an Id
- Messages can be sent by Id
  - If the Id does not exists, the message may be handled by a router
    - A router can tell an appropriate supervisor to spawn the missing actor
    - A router can respond with NOT_FOUND
- Messages can be sent by Type
  - Many actors of the type may exist
  - Routing options are:
    - round robin
    - attach to recipient by message type
    - attach to recipient by origin type
    - attach to recipient by origin Id
Actors communicate only via messages
Each actor has a mailbox
- The mailbox can be used to send messages to itself
- The mailbox determines parallelism, i.e. how many messages the actor can process in parallel
  - The default is 1, i.e. the actor does not require locks for work since it's inherently single-threaded

Messages are immutable
Value payload of message
- must be serializable
- must be freezable
- Can be an expression, all members of which must obey the above

All actors are spawned by a director
Analogous to erlang style supervisors
Directors are actors (yeah, you know they always think of themselves as actors)
At host startup there is just the central director
Directors can have peers
- Peers mirror each others supervision lists
- If a peer dies, the rest try to restart the peer if possible, otherwise divide its supervision list among themselves

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