So despite it being a solution that has existed for distributed systems since the 70s I was watching a talk from Microsoft on the topic where they would refer to actors as “cloud native objects” and the model itself as an ideal way to do OOP on distributed systems. The marketing feels a little cringe at first but the mental model works well.
I have an object which contains some state. Normally I would be responsible for managing the entire lifecycle of this object including resolving race conditions for DB writes and a million other problems that make distributed systems difficult. With many modern implementations of the actor model however (Microsoft have done a lot of interesting stuff here building Azure and Xbox games like Halo using Actors heavily) you don’t have to worry about any of this. You can just call the object as though you had unlimited RAM and it was in memory for you and race conditions were no longer a thing that you had to worry about.
This paper is a good intro to the topic I found https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...