nola | distributed virtual actor system

nola is a Go library typically used in Binary Executable Format applications. nola has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

NOLA is a distributed virtual actor system that is heavily inspired by Cloudflare Durable Objects and other virtual actor systems like Orleans. I highly recommend reading the Orleans paper if you're unfamiliar, but I will do my best to summarize. If you're not familiar with virtual actor systems or Cloudflare durable objects, you can think of Actors as "classes" (state + logic) that come bundled with a single-threaded (per-actor) execution environment. This is a common pattern used in many applications for building large scale distributed systems, or even managing concurrency within a single process. It is employed by popular libraries / frameworks like Erlang, Akka, and others. The difference between "traditional" Actor systems like Erlang/Akka and "virtual" actor systems like Orleans and NOLA is that the actors are treated as "virtual" entities instead of "physical" ones. Once an actor has been created in NOLA, it exists forever. While an actor may not always actually be "activated" and loaded in memory at any given moment, from an external perspective, NOLA will behave as if it is. This is the "Perpetual existence" concept referred to in the Orleans paper, and what allows virtual actor systems to be "highly available" despite not having supervision trees like Akka and Erlang do. If an actor is already "activated" on a server in-memory, all requests for that actor will be routed to that server. If the actor is not currently activated on any server, then it will be activated "on-demand" as soon as a message is sent to it. As a user of NOLA, you never have to think about "where" an Actor lives, or how to reach it. NOLA abstracts that all away ("location transparency"). As long as you know the ID of an actor, you can always reach it, and NOLA will ensure it is always reachable.