14.1. The big picture

A worker is simply a Golo function that can be executed concurrently. You can pass messages to a worker, and they are eventually received and handled by their target worker. In other words, workers react to messages in an asynchronous fashion.

Communications between a worker and some client code happens through ports. A port is simply an object that is responsible for dispatching a message to its worker.

Ports are obtained by spawning a worker function from a worker environment. Internally, a worker environment manages a java.util.concurrent executor, which means that you do not have to deal with thread management.