Ismail Muhammad

Asynchronous processes in Javascript are hard. Not just hard to write, but especially hard to reason about. Will things happen in the order we intended? Complexity caused by async exists in all programming languages. In multi-threaded environments like Erlang and Java there is an elegant approach to manage the complexity caused by async: Actor model. In this talk we will see how Actor Model can be applied to Javascript. It does not just result in simpler code, but also in a conceptual model of processes that is much easier to reason about. We compiled our experience into our own library: Actrix.
We will show how the Actor model solve async problem in a very elegant way by exchanging messages between actors. We will dive into several different actor patterns, like bindings between the actors world and the UI, optimizations by skipping messages, or even cancelling async operations.
The Actrix library bring much more to the table: uniform communication method for local and remote actors. It also does not force developers to write actor in a peculiar way, allowing standard OO pattern like inheritance or composition to be applied. Not to mention type safety with TypeScript so that errors can be identified faster and developers will have full support on their IDE for feature like auto-completion and such.