// the find
anthdm/hollywood
Blazingly fast and light-weight Actor engine written in Golang
Hollywood is a lightweight actor-model library for Go: actors, supervision, fire-and-forget or request/response messaging, and an event stream for deadletters and restarts, with optional remote actors and cluster support over protobuf/dRPC. Useful for Go developers building latency-sensitive, fault-tolerant services like game servers or trading systems who want Erlang-style isolation without leaving the Go ecosystem.
The core actor/engine package is small and readable, not buried under a DI framework or config layer. It ships both local and remote messaging with a real event stream (DeadLetterEvent, ActorRestartedEvent) wired into log/slog, not just a toy pub-sub. Cluster support (consul_provider.go, member join/leave, activation/deactivation) is a genuine step past most actor libraries that stop at single-process. WASM compilation target is a nice extra for running actor logic in-browser.
The headline claim of '10 million messages in under 1 second' doesn't match the actual benchmark output printed two lines later in the same README (3.2-3.5M msgs/sec with 20 workers) - read the numbers, not the pitch. Remote messaging requires hand-rolled protobuf definitions with checked-in .pb.go files in examples, no generator ergonomics shown. The cluster package has no narrative documentation beyond a build.sh, so understanding topology discovery means reading selfmanaged.go and consul_provider.go directly. 'Used in production' lists two small companies, so the remote/cluster path is lightly battle-tested compared to the core actor engine.