One of the selling points of Scala is that actors were created as a library without special syntax or compiler support as described in this paper: http://infos

One of the selling points of Scala is that actors were created as a library without special syntax or compiler support as described in this paper: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/128406 http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/128406 One of the advantages of this is that improved implementations can be provided by third parties such as Akka and Lift. Its a shame the current default implementation is so slow but for me this doesn't reflect badly on Scala the language.