Christmas Actor Hackday

Goal of the "Christmas Actor Hack" is to get in touch with the Actor model. That includes:

actors (or grains as Orleans calls it, or processes as the Erlang/Elixir community calls it)
passing immutable messages between actors
each actor having a mailbox which it processes
a simple programming model where actor code apprears single-threaded, because concurrency is handled by the actor system
different implementations, such as
- the BEAM (Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine), which is the Erlang VM
  - which is what the Erlang Language runs on
    - which is what Elixir compiles down to
    - and Erlang is that thing which the Whatsapp Backend runs on
- Akka, the JVM implementation to get as close to what Erlang offers, but on a VM which isn't designed for that
- Akka.net, the CLR port of Akka
- Orleans, which implements a "virtual actor model" where actor state is persisted in a backing store such as Azure tables, so if actors crash, or need to be garbage-collected, they can be re-vamped and brought back to live
  - Orleans being the backend for Halo 4, where each past game, each player, etc., is an actor
- Service Fabric's Actor model, which is a rewrite of Orleans, because, hey, Orleans is just this researchy thing :-)

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