Go Actors - Blazingly Fast, Low-Latency Actors for Golang

Md Sulaiman — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:34:04 +0000

Goactors - Blazingly Fast, Low-Latency Actors for Golang

Goactors is an ultra-fast actor engine designed for speed and low-latency applications such as game servers, advertising brokers, and trading engines. It can handle 10 million messages in under 1 second.

🚀 Features

✅ Guaranteed message delivery on actor failure (buffer mechanism)

✅ Fire & forget, request & response messaging supported

✅ High-performance dRPC transport layer

✅ Optimized protobufs without reflection

✅ Lightweight and highly customizable

✅ WASM Compilation: Supports GOOS=js and GOOS=wasm32

✅ Cluster support for distributed, self-discovering actors

🔥 Benchmarks

make bench

spawned 10 engines
spawned 2000 actors per engine
Send storm starting, will send for 10s using 20 workers
Messages sent per second 1333665
..
Messages sent per second 677231
Concurrent senders: 20 messages sent 6114914, messages received 6114914 - duration: 10s
messages per second: 611491
deadletters: 0

📦 Installation

go get github.com/khulnasoft/goactors/...

Note: Goactors requires Golang 1.21

🚀 Quickstart

Hello World Example

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/khulnasoft/goactors/actor"
)

type message struct {
    data string
}

type helloer struct{}

func newHelloer() actor.Receiver {
    return &helloer{}
}

func (h *helloer) Receive(ctx *actor.Context) {
    switch msg := ctx.Message().(type) {
    case actor.Initialized:
        fmt.Println("Helloer initialized")
    case actor.Started:
        fmt.Println("Helloer started")
    case actor.Stopped:
        fmt.Println("Helloer stopped")
    case *message:
        fmt.Println("Hello, world!", msg.data)
    }
}

func main() {
    engine, _ := actor.NewEngine(actor.NewEngineConfig())
    pid := engine.Spawn(newHelloer, "hello")
    engine.Send(pid, &message{data: "Hello, Goactors!"})
}

📂 More examples are available in the examples folder.

🛠 Spawning Actors

Default Configuration

e.Spawn(newFoo, "myactorname")

Passing Arguments to Actor Constructor

func newCustomNameResponder(name string) actor.Producer {
    return func() actor.Receiver {
        return &nameResponder{name}
    }
}

pid := engine.Spawn(newCustomNameResponder("Khulnasoft"), "name-responder")

Custom Configuration

e.Spawn(newFoo, "myactorname",
    actor.WithMaxRestarts(4),
    actor.WithInboxSize(2048),
)

Stateless Function Actors

e.SpawnFunc(func(c *actor.Context) {
    switch msg := c.Message().(type) {
    case actor.Started:
        fmt.Println("Actor started")
    }
}, "foo")

🌍 Remote Actors

Goactors allows actors to communicate over a network using the Remote package with protobuf serialization.

Example Configuration

import "crypto/tls"

tlsConfig := &tls.Config{Certificates: []tls.Certificate{cert}}
config := remote.NewConfig().WithTLS(tlsConfig)
remote := remote.New("0.0.0.0:2222", config)
engine, _ := actor.NewEngine(actor.NewEngineConfig().WithRemote(remote))

📂 Check out the Remote Actor Examples and Chat Server for details.

🎯 Event Stream

Goactors provides a powerful event stream to handle system events gracefully:

✅ Monitor crashes, deadletters, and network failures

✅ Subscribe actors to system events

✅ Broadcast custom events

List of Internal Events:

actor.ActorInitializedEvent
actor.ActorStartedEvent
actor.ActorStoppedEvent
actor.DeadLetterEvent
actor.ActorRestartedEvent
actor.RemoteUnreachableEvent
cluster.MemberJoinEvent
cluster.MemberLeaveEvent
cluster.ActivationEvent
cluster.DeactivationEvent

📂 See the Event Stream Example for usage.

⚙️ Customizing the Engine

Use function options to customize the Goactors engine:

r := remote.New(remote.Config{ListenAddr: "0.0.0.0:2222"})
engine, _ := actor.NewEngine(actor.EngineOptRemote(r))

🏗 Middleware

Extend actors with custom middleware for:

Metrics collection
Data persistence
Custom logging

📂 Examples available in the middleware folder.

📝 Logging

Goactors uses structured logging via log/slog:

import "log/slog"
slog.SetDefaultLogger(myCustomLogger)

✅ Testing

make test

📜 License

Goactors is licensed under the MIT License.

DEV Community: KhulnaSoft