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.
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