Actors are decoupled from the means by which they are executed. Scala has a nice system where you can run thousands of event-based actors in a thread pool. It g

Actors are decoupled from the means by which they are executed. Scala has a nice system where you can run thousands of event-based actors in a thread pool. It grows the pool as needed (as threads block). See http://www.scala-lang.org/node/242 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/242 While it may use threads, Scala's actor system effectively allows you to create thousands of actors. Kilim is actually a pure (depending on whether you see a byte-code processing system as pure) Java system that does the same thing (as far as I can tell): http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim/ http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim/ Kilim's author did a nice Google Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37NaHRE0Sqw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37NaHRE0Sqw EDIT: Fixed some grammar and added video link.