theon
commented
9 years ago Futures vs Actors has been widely debated. Both have pros and cons and I agree with many arguments on both sides of the debate. I think there is a lot of personal preference involved and I don't think there is a right answer.
A couple reasons you may want to use Actors:
- You can drop in something like kamon to easily get good metrics in production. Metrics + monitoring can be harder with Futures. They are harder to introspect.
- Actors are good for dealing with mutable state. Since Actors guarantee to only process one message at a time on a single thread and do not expose their internal state, they make it easier to avoid synchronization bugs.
- Actors have a supervision hierarchy, which is good for handling failures.
- Actors are good if you prefer a more imperative coding style. Futures have a more functional coding style which can lead to callback hell.
- akka-testkit makes writing unit tests with Actors a joy. I've never before enjoyed writing unit tests as much
All this said, I do like working with Futures. I'm not a huge fan of combining Actors and Futures with the ask pattern (which is what I was trying to avoid with this demo) . Here is my blog post explaining more about that. Things have changed a little since I wrote that post. If you use tools like kamon, AskTimeoutExceptions will no longer be completely useless.
LogicalTime
Is there a reason why the code is using actors? If not, this sample may be pointing people in the wrong direction - when their best option would be to create routes returning
Future[HttpResponse]s, instead of employing actors. Am I right?See Don't Use Actors for Concurrency