Is Scala's actors similar to Go's coroutines?

Question

If I wanted to port a Go library that uses Goroutines, would Scala be a good choice because its inbox/akka framework is similar in nature to coroutines?

Answer 1

These are all great and thorough answers. But for a simple way to look at it, here is my view. Goroutines are a simple abstraction of Actors. Actors are just a more specific use-case of Goroutines.

You could implement Actors using Goroutines by creating the Goroutine aside a Channel. By deciding that the channel is 'owned' by that Goroutine you're saying that only that Goroutine will consume from it. Your Goroutine simply runs an inbox-message-matching loop on that Channel. You can then simply pass the Channel around as the 'address' of your "Actor" (Goroutine).

But as Goroutines are an abstraction, a more general design than actors, Goroutines can be used for far more tasks and designs than Actors.

A trade-off though, is that since Actors are a more specific case, implementations of actors like Erlang can optimize them better (rail recursion on the inbox loop) and can provide other built-in features more easily (multi process and machine actors).