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actor-ts

Intro glossary

A starter vocabulary for the foundational concepts. For the comprehensive cross-reference with every term used in the docs, see the full glossary.

Core

Section titled “Core”

Actor. An entity with its own state + behavior that processes messages one at a time. See Actor.

ActorSystem. The top-level container for actors — one per process, owns the dispatcher + scheduler + supervisor tree. See ActorSystem.

ActorRef. A typed handle to an actor. You tell and ask via the ref. See Actor.

Mailbox. The per-actor message queue. Default FIFO, unbounded. See Mailboxes.

Dispatcher. Schedules when an actor’s onReceive runs on the JS event loop. See Dispatchers.

Communication

Section titled “Communication”

tell. Fire-and-forget send. The default verb. See Messages.

ask. Request/response over actors — returns a Promise. See Ask pattern.

Message. Any value you tell. Convention: discriminated union with a kind field. See Messages.

Lifecycle

Section titled “Lifecycle”

Supervisor strategy. Per-parent logic that maps a child’s error to a directive (Restart / Resume / Stop / Escalate). See Supervision.

Death watch. Subscribe to “this actor stopped” events via context.watch(ref). See Death watch.

PoisonPill. System message that gracefully stops an actor after its mailbox drains. See Poison pill and Kill.

Distribution

Section titled “Distribution”

Cluster. A group of actor systems that gossip membership. See Cluster overview.

Sharding. One-actor-per-entity-key, distributed across nodes. See Sharding overview.

Singleton. Exactly one actor cluster-wide. See Singleton overview.

Persistence

Section titled “Persistence”

PersistentActor. Event-sourced actor base class. Events are durable; state is derived from them. See PersistentActor.

Journal. The append-only event store. See Persistence overview.

Snapshot. Periodic state dump that bounds the event-replay window. See Snapshots.

Quick patterns

Section titled “Quick patterns”

onReceive. An actor’s main method — handles each incoming message.

context. The runtime API every actor has access to — spawning children, timers, watch, become.

Props. The construction recipe for an actor — factory

  • optional supervisor / dispatcher / mailbox. See Props.

Where to next

Section titled “Where to next”