It's worth pointing out that the example you linked with the cdecl is not showcasing the swift-java interoperability but using "raw" JNI patterns as if you would do it with C.
Hi there (ex Akka core team here). Yeah there's slight differences what the main concept is in those libraries. It kind of boils down to Akka's concept of an actor being more low level, and then adding the capabilities that Orleans offers as "the way" in means of extensions.
A virtual actor is very similar to an entity in Akka that is running in cluster sharding and uses Akka persistence. It's just that it's not packaged up into the virtual actor concept by default. I would love Akka to provide a more hand-holding more Orleans style module to be honest, it's a great concept and way to think about systems :-)
The post, somewhat surprisingly, omits to mention Akka Streams (which is a perfect fit, since, as the post mentions 'The data came through a stream [...]'), and Reactive Kafka (which is an official Akka project https://github.com/akka/reactive-kafka ) which solve this exact use case.
These projects/modules have been around since 2014, and we've been presenting / sharing information about them a lot since then. Perhaps this post can be interpreted that we need to put even more effort into the discoverability of them (in fact, we are right now reworking documentation for this and more). Using Akka Streams, a complete re-implementation of the example use-case mentioned in the post would look like this:
Too bad the team missed these... I would have loved to point the team to the right (existing) abstraction/library in one of our many communities (github, gitter chat and the mailing lists - we're pretty nice people, come around some time), rather than posting like this. What we've learnt here though is that we need to work even harder on the discoverability of those libraries - and indeed it is one of the things we focus on nowadays (with docs re-designs, cross links, better search and more).
Anyway, just wanted to let you all know what Akka has in store for such use cases, Streaming is definitely a first class citizen in the toolkit.
Typesafe/Lightbend continues to back Scala as it always did, no change there. Scala Center is a great additional move to get additional people / resources to work on Scala :-) So while "the recent typesafe news" are nothing to worry about, the scala center news are very awesome for the entire Scala community :-) (disclaimer: Akka team here)
And optimistically, maybe a way to give some of the other community stakeholders, like Typelevel, a more official seat at the table. But I haven't heard anything about what Typelevel feels about this, so maybe I'm speaking too soon.
This example does showcase the interoperability: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-android-examples/tree/mai... you don't have to annotate or write any "weird" cdecls or really touch JNI details yourself when using the swift-java interop support https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-java