An Architecture for Millions of Things

Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things by jdmichal on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:02AM (#12091942)

The author clarified on Reddit [0] that the lists are separated per type, so a list will only contain data for a single actor. So the actors are likely looping over lists and processing each entry, which should look to the CPU like any other array-processing code and optimize pretty well. It's a bit deceptive, since actors would typically be isolated. Instead, it seems like the "big idea" here is simply separate different data types into different lists and process them with different threads, using message queues as the concurrency mechanism.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4sp25q/xpost_r...

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Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things by anselm_eickhoff on Thursday July 14, 2016 @08:19AM (#12093105)

Exactly, and messages are divided into buckets which contain only one kind of (type of message, type of receiver)-combination. If you then iterate over that, you are going to execute very similar code repetitively.

I guess my epiphany was that exactly because actors are isolated, I could manage them like this and do some very primitive fast array iteration, while still using a nice high-level pattern to implement the actual game logic.

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