Actor Model
The Actor Model is a conceptual framework for concurrent and distributed computing that treats 'actors' as the fundamental units of computation. Each actor is an independent entity that can send and receive messages, create new actors, and modify its own private state, enabling systems to handle high concurrency without traditional locking mechanisms. It provides a mathematical model for reasoning about systems where multiple processes interact asynchronously.
Developers should learn the Actor Model when building highly concurrent, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems, such as real-time messaging apps, distributed databases, or IoT platforms, as it simplifies handling parallelism by avoiding shared mutable state and deadlocks. It is particularly useful in scenarios requiring massive scalability, like cloud-based services or gaming servers, where traditional threading models become complex and error-prone.