What is the best way to do TCP/sockets networking?

[ethindp]

So, I'm sort-of new to the actor model. I understand it conceptually but am struggling to put it into practice.

I want to develop an app which needs to communicate with clients which don't support the GRPC protocol or message framing. My idea was to start with something simple like telnet: it's old, but it's also supported by literally anything and everything.

The problem is that multiplexing on many sockets via System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Select/Poll seems... A bit inefficient, and I don't yet know how to use IActor to schedule something to be run continuously. I thought of maybe using some kind of background IO thread and then sending messages into the actor system from outside, but I'm not entirely sure how I should best go about that. Or if there's a better way.

So, what I'm trying to ask is: what are the typical strategies for handling this in the actor model and with Proto.Actor specifically? Am I just over-engineering this in my head?