The Curse of the A-word
I took my first steps into the Actor Model space more than a decade ago, when I started working on the Orleans project. I have been and will continue to be an enthusiast of actors. We published a few papers and I gave a number of talks about them. However, over time I gradually stopped using the term 'actors' even when explaining the properties and benefits of the Actor Model. This post is an attempt to explain why.
When we open-sourced Orleans in January of 2015, I was surprised by the amount of debate it generated on the seemingly trivial topic. The debate was about whether or not Orleans was in fact a faithful implementation of the Actor Model and if grains were actors at all. Even though we published the tech report "Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability" nine months beforehand, it didn't seem to help much in those discussions.
It honestly took us more than a year to reach a point when Virtual Actors of Orleans were generally recognized as a legitimate interpretation of the Actor Model. It was not just another interpretation, but one that has its unique benefits, especially for high-scale applications like cloud services. I was shocked by the uphill battle it took to get there. Over time, I came to realize that a big reason for these debates is the fact that actors are inherently a minefield of conflations.
