I like the idea of actors to encapsulate state management for my aggregates (a la Domain Driven Design). But I haven't wanted to be limited to just using Elixir/BEAM or an actor toolkit on the JVM.

I'd wager that Dapr's virtual actors [1] were inspired in-part by Microsoft's work on Orleans [2]. I've read through some of the Orleans docs, and Dapr looks to be a more accessible (cross-language, non-CLR!) way to build using some of Orleans' concepts and capabilities.

!! this is super cool: "You can also perform aggregate queries across actor instances, avoiding the common turn-based concurrency limitations of actor frameworks [3].

[1]: https://github.com/dapr/docs/tree/master/concepts/actor [2]: http://dotnet.github.io/orleans/ [3]: https://github.com/dapr/docs/blob/master/concepts/state-mana...