I myself am mostly aquainted with Akka for Scala. So I was wondering what different design decisions they made, if any. After all a second implementation of a framework is often better than the first.<p>They do go into that in the research paper [1].<p>"Actor platforms such as Erlang [3] and Akka [2] are a step forward in simplifying distributed system programming. However, they still burden developers with many distributed system complexities because of the relatively low level of provided abstractions and system services. The key challenges are the need to manage the lifecycle of actors in the application code and deal with inherent distributed races, the responsibility to handl e failures and recovery of actors , the placement of actors, and thus distributed resource management. To build a correct solution to such problems in the application, the developer must be a distributed systems expert. To avoid these complexities, we built the Orleans programming model and runtime, which raises the level of the actor abstraction."<p>It's an interesting question how hard it would be to offer such a often-good-enough option in Akka for the cases when you don't have the need or the time or the team to develop a custom distributed computing model.<p>Edit: maybe Lagom is meant to fit that space. I think it's wider in scope than 'easy actors' though.