[nikitaga]

It became less popular a long time ago as the hype of actors as a programming paradigm died down, and then eventually akka adopted non-OSS BSL license which made many users including us switch to Pekko (a community fork) which is still developed and maintained, but again, this branch of Scala evolution is quite past its prime. Scala offers more and arguably better libraries for working with concurrency now, and even cooler stuff is on the horizon with kyo / ox / caprese.

But akka aka pekko is still perfectly usable.

[renegade-otter]

I have been working on adding Pekko-based data pipeline into my side project, and it's an incredibly powerful system. The "bare" actors are rarely used. With streams, you can control parallelism, backpressure, add batching, retries, and so on. This is why this is so popular with systems ingesting massive amounts of data - log processing, IoT telemetry.

Which libraries are you referring to that do the same? Just curious.

[nikitaga]

I meant FP libraries like Cats Effect / FS2 / ZIO et al. – they don't really do the things that Akka / Pekko is very good at, such as multi-machine parallelism, but the conventional wisdom nowadays seems to be that it's easier to start with those libraries and progress to Pekko if you ever need that, rather than architect the system with Pekko from the start when you don't need its power.

I don't know if I personally agree with that, I've had a better experience with Akka (even raw actors) than with FP libraries, but what I mentioned is definitely the general vibe in the publicly active part of the community that's I'm observing. We gotta keep in mind that there are lots of companies and devs that never talk about what they're doing in public, so of course my perception is biased by that.

My own expertise is shifting more and more to the frontend / Scala.js these days, so please forgive/correct any inaccuracies.