Tarant is a TypeScript/JavaScript library for building software using the actor system model. You can visit the home page for more information and a more complete quick start guide: https://www.tarant.io/
- Actors are easy to reason about: An actor is the unit of state and logic of your application. They are transactional, so you don’t need to handle state rollbacks in case of errors.
- Actors improve performance: Asynchronous by default, every actor actual communication is non-blocking so slow actors will not block fast actors.
- Actors are extensible: As actors are built on top of objects, actor classes can be inherited, composed and injected.
Features
Tarant implements a rich set of features that makes it suitable for building complex applications.
- Actors are reliable because they are transactional. You don’t need to bother yourself with error recovery.
- Actors are performant, as they are pull-based and decoupled from other actors lifecycle.
- Actors are easy to debug. All messages come with information about the sender and all the state information is saved in a time machine, for further debugging and navigation.
- The Actor System has an event bus. Actors can subscribe, publish and request messages from any topic and subscriptions can be handled at any time.
- The Actor System is highly extensive. You can add your own supervisor and materializers to add new features like implicit persistence or rendering of actors.
Showcase
- Actors support asynchronous messaging and answering through Promises. Slow actors will not block fast actors.
- Actors can schedule tasks for interval or one-shot delayed actions.
- Actors are safe and can be recovered with a supervisor.
- Actors can subscribe in a topic in a type-safe way for extensible communication.
Quick start
Creating your first actor system is easy and you don’t need to understand everything that is happening under the hood. First you must install the package:
npm install tarant --save
Then create your first ActorSystem
let { Actor, ActorSystem } = require('tarant')
let system = ActorSystem.default()
And create your actor class:
class Ping extends Actor {
ping() {
console.log("PING")
}
}
Then you only need to instantiate your actor and send messages to it:
let myPinger = system.actorOf(Ping, [])
myPinger.ping()
The application will continue running and processing messages until you stop the actor system:
system.free()
If you run the application you will see the following output:
PING
Contribution 
PR and issues are always welcome as a quick way of contributing to the project. Remember to be polite, this is a open source project and ordinary requirements for PRs and issues are also a requirement.
If you want to be a long-term contributor and participate actively on the design of new features on the project, contact us! Check the package.json to see who you need to contact.