Hacker News Reader

Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

In scala-land, a lot of people like to scoff at Akka because they prefer other pure fp concepts, but I don't think they've found a replacement for Akka Cluster - where you need objects that have both state and behavior, meaning they need to exist in memory, and where there are too many to exist on one server.

If you don't need behavior, you can use things like distributed databases or caches, and if you don't need to scale out, there are other pure fp solutions. But for this kind of distributed behavior, it still seems to me that Akka Cluster is the killer app.

View on HN

I don't think the scala crowd scoffs at Akka because they are beholden to pure functional programming. The pure FP crowd is actually a minority...significant enough to acknowledge, but not enough to make or break anything about the community.

The real problem with Akka is that, at least until very recently, you had to abandon any semblance of type safety if you used it. That was very frustrating to work with. I can take or leave pure FP, but you can pry my strong static typing from my cold dead hands.

I wouldn’t say all type safety. It just couldn’t prevent you from sending unhandled messages to actors

I wonder what it would look like trying to implement something like the IO monad backed by Akka actors. Can't recall anything off the top of my head that would make that untenable aside from the aforementioned scoffing.

Take a look at ZIO Actors (https://zio.github.io/zio-actors/).

Thanks for the pointer, wasn't aware ZIO had an actor implementation. My interest was the inversion, though, which is “Could you make a (more or less) drop-in replacement for Future/IO/Task/ZIO that implements not just concurrency, but distributed concurrency using actors” (Where the actors could be Akka, ZIO, etc.).

I have seen several such implementations. They are fairly robust although feel a bit awkward when compared to streams. Scala Fs2 and zstreams are just too good once you figure them out. Neither provide clustering of course

Reply on news.ycombinator.com