Towards Actor-Based Game Engines: A Vision for Swift-Native Interactive Systems

Traditional game engines are fundamentally constrained by imperative, centralized update loops that limit parallelization and scalability on modern multi-core architectures. In this position paper, I propose a radical departure from conventional game engine design through a declarative, actor-based architecture leveraging Swift's advanced concurrency model. This paper presents a conceptual framework that eliminates centralized game loops in favor of isolated, asynchronously communicating game entities using Swift's `actor` model and Combine framework. This vision paper outlines how such an architecture could resolve fundamental concurrency issues in game engines while providing a foundation for next-generation Apple-native development. The paper discusses the theoretical advantages, anticipated challenges, and provides a research roadmap for realizing this paradigm shift in interactive system design.