It is an experimental actor system written in TypeScript. It's written with a certain project of mine in mind, not to mimic existing actor model implementations.
It's published as @yorgos/experimental, to allow me to bump version numbers with wild abandon. If/when a stable version arises, it'll be published as a different package, starting from version 1.0.0.
In short, this is an actor system for IoT.
Actors communicate via messages that can be serialized as JSON, addressing each other by id only. Everything should happen asynchronously. This is already implemented and more or less thought out.
At some point in the future yorgos should allow for a distributed actor system where actors form a mesh network, allowing actors/nodes to roam, have intermittent connections, and be more independent in general. There are a lot of open questions related to this, and I have to study and think a bit more to answer them.
Given how messaging happens, and how easy it is to run an actor independently, it's going to be very easy to implement the equivalents of SpawnFn and message routing functions in other languages - which is enough to run a node on a low-powered SoC, for example.
I try to implement as little as I can get away with, and I'm currently thinking about:
- system hierarchy
- actor lifecycle management and garbage collection
- location transparency / message routing
If you're interested in playing with this, look throgh the code, and keep in mind that this README could be outdated.
Starting points are to be found in packages/experimental/src with explanations in the comments, which should be read in the order listed:
types/system.tscontains the definitions of the entities one has to start with as a consumer of the librarytypes/actor.tscontains definitons and explanations relating toActorsspawn.tshelps one understand how and what actors are composed (of)- finally,
system.tsfor putting it all together
I'm going for the mythical "self-documenting, readable code", so if there are no comments, just read the code!
I'm still short of a few utilities that make this usable, expect examples once I'm done with those.
In the project root:
npm run tests to run tests for all packages
npm run builds to build all packages
npm run format to format the entire repo (js, ts, json)
// NOTE: ... comments should grab your attention, these are tweaks, hacks, things that are not self-explanatory etc. This usually means that the highlighted issue can't be fixed (for now) or wasn't fixed in lack of time or energy.
Project-wide NOTEs:
- had to downgrade
typescriptto5.5.4because of an issue withts-transform-paths - incremental builds and composite projects are currently disabled (these will be needed with more packages in this repo, but until then it's easier to just discard the
distdirectory before every build, making sure no junk makes its way to a published package)
This package is built as an ES module using the typescript compiler, without any bundlers. It's built to ES2022 - assuming that if you're using it you're either using the latest version of node, or you're going to run it through a bundler anyways.
The package relies on some path mapping set in tsconfig.json, these need to be transformed to relative paths in dist, which is handled using typescript-transform-paths and ts-patch.