Discuss the differences and use-cases for Futures and Akka Actors in Scala for handling concurrency.

A Scala Future represents one eventual result or failure. An Akka actor is a longer-lived participant that owns behavior and state and processes messages. Both normally execute work on threads managed by an execution context or dispatcher; this is not a distinction between a threaded system and a system without threads.

Use futures to compose bounded asynchronous requests or calculations. For example, start two independent requests through asynchronous clients and combine their results. Starting them before composition permits overlap; constructing the second after the first completes makes it dependent. Blocking calls inside a future still block a worker, and overlap does not guarantee lower latency or higher throughput. Futures

Use actors when a message protocol and owned evolving state are useful, such as tracking a device's connection state or coordinating a workflow. An actor processes one message at a time, but different actors may run concurrently. Preserve that isolation: send results back as messages rather than changing actor state directly from a future callback. Avoid blocking message handlers and sharing mutable payloads. Actor interaction patterns

For failures, futures support propagation and deliberate recovery. Akka Typed behaviors can be wrapped in supervision strategies; the default for an unhandled exception is to stop the actor. Supervision is not a transaction rollback, automatic message retry or durable storage. Typed supervision

Actors can participate in distributed systems with additional configuration, but ordinary sends do not promise exactly-once processing or durable delivery. Address acknowledgements, retries, idempotency, queue bounds and persistence according to the workflow. Futures and actors can be combined; choose the simplest abstraction that meets the required state, failure and delivery contract.