Core Concepts
How dnzl’s mental model works and why it’s designed this way.
Documentation Structure
Understand
Section titled “Understand” Actors and Streams What an actor is, how ST streams work as inboxes and outboxes, and how behaviour functions compose.
Reply and Become How reply wraps return values, how become swaps behaviour, and how Either routing works.
Composition Wiring actors: outbox → inbox, merge, send, when-c routing, and multi-output cycles.
Lazy Evaluation How Nix laziness serves as the dnzl runtime — dependency order, ping-pong, feedback loops.
Guides
Section titled “Guides”How-To Guides
Step-by-step walkthroughs and practical examples.
Getting Started A minimal working example: one behaviour, one actor, one stream. Everything you need to understand the basics.
Building Pipelines Chain actors into processing pipelines using outbox-to-inbox wiring and merge.
Private Channels Tagged bus pattern: multiple clients share one stream, each reads only their own replies.
World Edge Using ned.run and static-d to drive actors from static inputs and collect results.
Patterns
Section titled “Patterns”Design Patterns
Recurring structures lifted from dnzl’s design notes.
Proxy and Delegation Forward messages to refs carried in the envelope. Capability refs as permissions.
Multi-Output Cycles Cycles that return named output streams — values, errors, audit logs — side by side.
Scatter-Gather Fan-out to N independent actors, fan-in results with merge.
Ping-Pong Two actors wired via lazy let — pong feeds ping without circularity.
Dynamic Dispatch Ref lives in the message envelope; dispatcher calls it at runtime.
Capability Refs Server vends refs; holding a ref is the permission.
Reference
Section titled “Reference”API Documentation
Complete reference for every primitive.
actor Wraps a behaviour into a cycle-c. Manages scanl state and outbox extraction.
reply reply, reply.right, reply.left — wraps return values for outbox extraction.
become Swap behaviour for the next message. How state machines work.
send Forward a stream to a ref. Creates a fresh actor session per call.
merge Fan-in multiple streams sequentially into one.
ST Combinators st.map, st.filter, st.flatMap, st.scanl as functor combinators.
ned Primitives run, static-d, map-c, when-c, scope-d, ctx-s — the ned layer under dnzl.