GoAkt vs ProtoActor

[bencz]

I've been following your project for a few months now. Currently, I use ProtoActor in .NET applications, where it is clearly more mature.

When evaluating ProtoActor for Golang, I noticed that it does not yet have the same maturity and stability as the .NET version, even though some companies are already using it in production.

So, I started looking for alternatives and came across your project.

I would like to know:

• How mature is GoAkt compared to ProtoActor in general?
• Does it have an Identity Registry (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.) for identity management?
• Can a virtual actor spawn multiple local actors under it?
• Have you conducted any benchmarks to evaluate its performance?
• Have you performed deeper tests in Kubernetes, such as scaling up and down, to assess actor behavior?
• And most importantly, how safe do you believe the project is for use in large-scale production?

P.S.: I really enjoy following your projects and learning from your code
thank you!

[Tochemey]

@bencz thanks for following the project.

• I believe a project maturity depends upon how many applications are using it and how often bugs are fixed and released. At the moment I really don't have the data. I am using it within a private application using the eGo framework. I know of few other projects using notably nex and zyre.
• I cannot compare GoAkt with any other go actors frameworks. Each framework is unique on its own in term of design, features, code quality, maintenance, etc...
• GoAkt is heavily inspired by Akka/Apache Pekko and borrow some concepts from Erlang. This is mainly due to the fact I used Akka and Erlang extensively in the past.
• There is no concept of virtual actors in GoAkt. There are only actors in the proper term.
• Actors can create child actors. You can check the doc
• In term of stress tests and co, I can only say I have some few articles from people who did some work with it. AFAIK, I would rather leave that to the community because it is an open source project and I am more than happy to collaborate with the community to make it better. Otherwise I can only enhance it based upon challenges I faced with my application(sorry to be selfish here 😂)
• GoAkt is open source. There is no hidden features or back door. One can use it in large-scale production application(don't only take my word for it, experiment it)

P.S: I am not the smartest engineer to build such a library. There are other frameworks in the ecosystem:

• https://github.com/ergo-services/ergo (this is also great and embraces all erlang concept)
• https://github.com/anthdm/hollywood
• https://github.com/asynkron/protoactor-go (I was a contributor some time past)

[Tochemey]

@bencz In GoAkt, actor messages are defined exclusively using Google Protocol Buffers. This choice was intentional to maintain a consistent message format across both local and networked communication, avoiding unnecessary serialization when messages go over the wire. While using Protobuf for in-process messaging introduces some overhead compared to native Go structs, the simplicity, schema evolution support, and interoperability outweigh these trade-offs for now. Optimizations are be explored for in-process performance becomes a bottleneck.