Pulsar is 100% written on top of asyncio. In this respect is not dissimilar to Tornado or Twisted, which also use an event loop for their asynchronous implementation (with their own event loop and Future classes).
However, pulsar is built on top of the standard lib with all the benefits that that brings, especially in view of the changes in python 3.5 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0492/).
The actor model in pulsar refers to the parallel side of the asynchronous framework. This is where pulsar differs from twisted for example. In pulsar each actor (think of a specialised thread or process) has its own event loop. In this way any actor can run its own asynchronous server for example.
Tornado is an asynchronous web framework, pulsar is not, you can use any web framework and run it on pulsar wsgi application. You can use pulsar to create any other socket application, not just HTTP.
However, pulsar is built on top of the standard lib with all the benefits that that brings, especially in view of the changes in python 3.5 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0492/).
The actor model in pulsar refers to the parallel side of the asynchronous framework. This is where pulsar differs from twisted for example. In pulsar each actor (think of a specialised thread or process) has its own event loop. In this way any actor can run its own asynchronous server for example.
Tornado is an asynchronous web framework, pulsar is not, you can use any web framework and run it on pulsar wsgi application. You can use pulsar to create any other socket application, not just HTTP.