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#16: Akka

Akka is a toolkit for building highly scalable, concurrent applications. It's written in Scala and based on the ideas from Erlang. Its approach to achieve concurrency is quite radical. Rather than mutexes, semaphores and shared memory, Akka uses so-called _actor model_. Actor is a small, stateful object that doesn't expose traditional methods. Instead, actors send and receive asynchronous messages with each other. There is no other way to interact with an actor. If you want an actor to do something or give you some information, message passing is the only way. Send a message, actor will receive it at some point in time, consume it and optionally send a response back.

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