Architectual improvement

[sphaero]

Why?

• We need to provide some way to visualise actors and communicate state
• Can we optimise thread usage?
• can we integrate API commands and actor messages or do we need separate sockets for regular messages and api messages? In theory a single socket can be used but then messages need to be detected
• Can we port ZOCP functionality which clearly made dealing with parameters (API) easier
• Has this been done before. Can build upon this knowledge
• Can we have an implementation that works on the stack making it possible to run on microcontrollers?
• Integrate process support in addition to the thread. This makes creating simple actors much easier from examples of others

[sphaero]

I think it's a good idea to reduce the actor to just being a function which receives messages (data) and can send data but just returns its state. So we don't return messages to be sent anymore. This opens the possibility to have multiple sockets.

We can provide automatic API handling (process special message signatures) or just let the user do that. If we use OSC we can use a special first character in the address string to signal it's an API message.

We can run this function on a thread, a green thread or a process.

We should look into opening the possibility to run your own loop in which you can just poll sockets etc. This makes it easier to integrate in existing loops.

[sphaero]

Look into https://libcsp.dev/

[sphaero]

Misty is a new language supporting actors as well. Ref: https://www.crockford.com/misty/actors.html