The fifth article describes the actor model, tells what is this model in Everscale and how it works.
โ Actors are small, executable code units that receive messages and then, depending on the message’s logic, respond to them by making local decisions
โ The actor model is a computing model with the actor as a central entity in concurrent computation
โ Two of the key characteristics of actors are their simplicity and intuitiveness
โ Through actors, failover execution and scalability become possible, and both pseudo-synchronous and asynchronous messaging are supported
โ In Everscale, everything is a smart contract, which can also be called an actor. In practice, a smart contract is an entity with properties such as address, code, data, and balance
โ To reach a consensus about the state, nodes that process transactions need to coordinate the state of the smart contract from time to time
โ In Everscale, the collection of all shards which contains all accounts behaving by one set of rules is called a workchain
โ The main Workchain is used for everyday transactions between actors. When there are a lot of user messages the workchain may be split into shards
โ Everscale’s architecture allows for creating up to 232 workchains, each subdivided into up to 256 shards or threads to be able to process a high number of transactions in times of heightened activity
๐ Follow the link (6 minutes read)