Gleam Actor Model

Actor-based concurrency on the Erlang VM uses lightweight processes and message passing for fault-tolerant applications. Gleam's OTP patterns enable you to create stateful actors that restart automatically on failure through supervisor trees, providing isolation and reliable message delivery without manual error handling.

Gleam actor design follows GenServer-like patterns with typed message protocols. Define actors that maintain internal state, handle typed messages, and respond to callers. Use process linking and monitoring to detect failures, and organize actors under supervisors to enforce restart strategies and fault tolerance.

Yes. Gleam supports designing worker pools and request-response services through OTP supervisor patterns. Spawn multiple worker actors under a supervisor, route messages to available workers, and handle selective receive to match responses. This scales concurrent request handling across the BEAM.

Supervision trees organize actors in hierarchical structures with restart policies. Supervisors monitor child actors, detect crashes, and automatically restart failed processes according to the strategy defined. This decouples failure recovery from application logic and ensures system resilience without explicit restart code.

Gleam abstracts OTP complexity into functional patterns, but understanding process linking, message passing, and supervisor concepts helps. Gleam's typed approach to messages and actor creation reduces boilerplate, making OTP patterns accessible for building event streams, counters, and stateful services without deep Erlang expertise.