What is the current status of the Actor API in the...

# coroutines

[napperley]

What is the current status of the Actor API in the KotlinX Coroutines library? I have a program (Industrial software that behaves like a Linux Daemon) running in production that heavily relies on the API, and would very likely break if a newer version of the KotlinX Coroutines library is used.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

The actor coroutine builder is annotated with @ObsoleteCoroutinesApi, so it could change or even disappear in newer versions.

[rkeazor]

I think it will be replaced by flow in the later versions

[napperley]

That would be very bad news since there is a need to support the Actor concurrency model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model ), which is one of the major concurrency models. Flow is a implementation of the RX concurrency model, which doesn't cover the safe handling of mutable state like Actor does, and doesn't have the concept of supervisors ( https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.5/general/supervision.html ).

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

There was a PR a couple years ago proposing a new API for typed actors, but i don’t think there’s been any work on that for a long time. I suspect that would be the replacement though, not Flow.

[Seri]

@napperley I’d recommend reading through the conversation here: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/issues/87