At the end of the day, I think Orleans and Akka are conceptually different types/notions of what an actor framework is.
> Orleans uses a different notion of identity than other actor systems. In other systems an “actor” might refer to a behavior and instances of that actor might refer to identities that the actor represents like individual users. In Orleans, an actor represents that persistent identity, and the actual instantiations are in fact reconcilable copies of that identity.
Hi there (ex Akka core team here). Yeah there's slight differences what the main concept is in those libraries. It kind of boils down to Akka's concept of an actor being more low level, and then adding the capabilities that Orleans offers as "the way" in means of extensions.
A virtual actor is very similar to an entity in Akka that is running in cluster sharding and uses Akka persistence. It's just that it's not packaged up into the virtual actor concept by default. I would love Akka to provide a more hand-holding more Orleans style module to be honest, it's a great concept and way to think about systems :-)
At the end of the day, I think Orleans and Akka are conceptually different types/notions of what an actor framework is.
> Orleans uses a different notion of identity than other actor systems. In other systems an “actor” might refer to a behavior and instances of that actor might refer to identities that the actor represents like individual users. In Orleans, an actor represents that persistent identity, and the actual instantiations are in fact reconcilable copies of that identity.