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Visualize actor system
in progress
David Khourshid
in progress
Stephen Buchanan
Is https://github.com/statelyai/xstate/pull/3969 part of the effort to allow for this?
David Khourshid
Stephen Buchanan: Yes it is, but more of the work is happening in the Studio side, and it is in progress.
Stephen Buchanan
Oh yes please! The very first project I picked to use Xstate for... relies on ALL of the important action happening inside the Actors themselves, and it's unfortunate that none of this can be modeled or simulated visually with the current tooling.
Angel
I imagine this would only be possible from the root actor. Although, there was a mention of parsing source files and generating an actor tree.
In any case, this would be very helpful as it's difficult to reason about multiple actors interacting with one another when you can only construct mental models. Without this, there is an inclination to combine everything into one big actor.
David Khourshid
planned
John Lombardo
Is the current thinking along the lines of the receptionist pattern or a parent-child?
David Khourshid
John Lombardo: I can see this handling both. Thanks to XState's API, we can know in advance when two different actors may communicate with each other in the future, even if they're not parent-child. I feel it's important to visualize those communication relationships.
John Lombardo
David Khourshid: This would help me a lot! Most things I work on involve a system of actors but right now a significant number of bugs are occurring because of poorly understood inter-actor communication.
John Lombardo
Got me again 😫