Question

Is there a design document for Scala 2.8 Actors, like it is for 2.7?

Scala Actors: Unifying Thread-based and Event-based Programming

Is there one for Akka?

The “Scala Improvement Documents Library” doesn’t mention Actors.

Answer 1

Update August 2012:

The Akka documentation has vastly improved, and has now many details on its design and architecture.

---

Original Answer (May 2010)

Regarding Akka, I didn’t find a design document per se, but the recent blog post series “Thinking Asynchronous – Domain Modeling using Akka Transactors” from Debasish Ghosh are close enough.

Here are some of the salient points in the implementation ..

1. Akka is based on the let-it-crash philosophy. You can design supervisor hierarchies that will be responsible for controlling the lifecycles of your actors. […]
2. accounts is the handle to a Map that gets persisted in Redis. Here we store all accounts that the clients open hashed by the account number. […]
3. With Akka you can also provide a restart hook when you repository crashes and gets restarted automatically by the supervisor. postRestart is the hook where we re-initialize the Map structure.
4. Akka uses multiverse, a Java based STM implementation for transaction handling. In the code mark your transactions using atomic{} and the underlying STM will take care of the rest.