Orleans – Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability

research.microsoft.com

Unfortunately, this is not a proper replacement for the Axum project that they killed for some lame reason:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axum_(programming_language)

http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/D/5/BD51FFB2-C777-4...

Now people will be choosing Akka.NET instead.

Orleans is more of a distributed RPC framework using message passing than a true actor framework. Take a look at BeeHive: https://github.com/aliostad/BeeHive

I'm scratching my head a bit on what "actor framework" really means. The only mildly interesting feature I see in BeeHive examples is the Channel, which looks like an asynchronous RPC, perhaps with ordering. Can someone please give an "elevator pitch" example of what "true actor framework" is and how it's different than async RPCs?

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