Actors Everywhere

This pattern is most interesting manifest in language syntax and semantics. See IO for such an implementation.

We used this pattern in Voyager. Any object could have a messages invoked on it through sync, async, and async future semantics. Obviously, Voyager being an ORB, these calls were generally most useful if made to remote objects, but nothing prevented you from making local calls through the intermediate queueing mechanisms.

From what I can tell, NetKernel is modern 'restful' implementation of much of the actor semantics. In NK parlance, accessors and/or resources are effectively actors that can be invoked synchronously and asynchronously with futures. This is effectively the reason internal and external requests feel transparent in the API, one of the arguments for using actor based patterns for object interaction.