actororiented

Actororiented is a design and programming paradigm that emphasizes the actor model as the fundamental unit of computation. In actororiented systems, computation is organized around autonomous actors that communicate through asynchronous messages rather than shared mutable state.

Each actor encapsulates its own state, processes messages sequentially, and can create new actors, send messages, and designate where to send future messages. There is no direct sharing of state; interaction occurs via message passing with potential nondeterminism in message arrival order. Execution is distributed and scalable, with fault isolation achieved through supervision and restart strategies.

Origin and usage: The actor model was introduced by Carl Hewitt in the 1970s. Actor-oriented approaches are implemented in Erlang/Elixir, Akka (Java/Scala), Orleans (Microsoft), and CAF (C++), among others, and are used to build highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems in telecom, web services, cloud platforms, and gaming.

Compared to object-oriented programming, actororiented systems emphasize isolation and asynchronous communication rather than shared state and synchronous method calls. Related concepts include actor model, mailboxes, supervision, and message pipelines. Trade-offs include increased complexity in reasoning about timing and eventual consistency, and learning curves for debugging distributed behavior.