[Discussion] Actor Model? Erlang / BEAM

[mikecann]

For a long while I have been jealous of Erlang's scale and tooling for monitoring, upgrading running systems and tolerance for crashes.

What has held me back really is the language (I would miss my types too much :P)

Since I first heard about Durable Objects I was excited as it sounded like the Actor model and it had me wondering; would it be possible to finally implement a proper serverless actor system using web languages and tooling?

Before experimenting with that; I wanted to scratch and itch for the summer dev challenge.

With that out of the way I got back to thinking about Actors and how it might be done. I came across this example on denoflare that showed that inter-DO sockets were possible. So now I know that I knew it must be possible to build a fan-out cluster of nodes that all talk to each other.

Then I came across this repo and have been mightily impressed. I think its exactly what you need for a foundation towards a proper Actor system.

What are your thoughts and plans long term for this library? What do you (and Cloudflare in general) think about Actor model on DO / Workers?

As a thought exercise how would you go about scaling the chat example from this repo up to handle 5,000,000 concurrent users?