Actor model

The Actor model simplifies concurrent computation: isolated 'actors' communicate via asynchronous messages.

The Actor model, proposed by Carl Hewitt in 1973 and later formalized by Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger, treats 'actors' as universal primitives of concurrent computation. Each actor (an object, process, or person) has its own private state and communicates solely through asynchronous message passing. This isolation eliminates shared memory issues, simplifying parallel programming significantly. Erlang, a functional programming language, famously implements the Actor model, enabling robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems (e.g., Ericsson's telecommunications platforms handling millions of concurrent calls). Akka, a toolkit for Scala and Java, also provides a popular implementation, allowing developers to build highly scalable, concurrent applications on the JVM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model