Concepts¶
Before diving into the API of CAF, we discuss the concepts behind it and explain the terminology used in this manual.
Actor Model¶
The actor model describes concurrent entities—actors—that do not share state and communicate only via asynchronous message passing. Decoupling concurrently running software components via message passing avoids race conditions by design. Actors can create—spawn—new actors and monitor each other to build fault-tolerant, hierarchical systems. Since message passing is network transparent, the actor model applies to both concurrency and distribution.
Implementing applications on top of low-level primitives such as mutexes and semaphores has proven challenging and error-prone. In particular when trying to implement applications that scale up to many CPU cores. Queueing, starvation, priority inversion, and false sharing are only a few of the issues that can decrease performance significantly in mutex-based concurrency models. In the extreme, an application written with the standard toolkit can run slower when adding more cores.
The actor model has gained momentum over the last decades due to its high level of abstraction and its ability to scale dynamically from one core to many cores and from one node to many nodes. However, the actor model has not yet been widely adopted in the native programming domain. With CAF, we contribute a framework for actor programming in C++ as open-source software to ease native development of concurrent as well as distributed systems. In this regard, CAF follows the C++ philosophy building the highest abstraction possible without sacrificing performance.
Terminology¶
CAF is inspired by other implementations based on the actor model such as Erlang or Akka. It aims to provide a modern C++ API allowing for type-safe as well as dynamically typed messaging. While there are similarities to other implementations, we made many different design decisions that lead to slight differences when comparing CAF to other actor frameworks.
Dynamically Typed Actor¶
A dynamically typed actor accepts any kind of message and dispatches on its content dynamically at the receiver. This is the traditional messaging style found in implementations like Erlang or Akka. The upside of this approach is (usually) faster prototyping and less code. This comes at the cost of requiring excessive testing.
Statically Typed Actor¶
CAF achieves static type-checking for actors by defining abstract messaging interfaces. Since interfaces define both input and output types, CAF is able to verify messaging protocols statically. The upside of this approach is much higher robustness to code changes and fewer possible runtime errors. This comes at an increase in required source code, as developers have to define and use messaging interfaces.
Actor References¶
CAF uses reference counting for actors. The three ways to store a reference to an actor are addresses, handles, and pointers. Note that address does not refer to a memory region in this context.
Address¶
Each actor has a (network-wide) unique logical address. This identifier is
represented by actor_addr
, which allows to identify and monitor an actor.
Unlike other actor frameworks, CAF does not allow users to send messages to
addresses. This limitation is due to the fact that the address does not contain
any type information. Hence, it would not be safe to send it a message, because
the receiving actor might use a statically typed interface that does not accept
the given message. Because an actor_addr
fills the role of an identifier, it
has weak reference semantics (see Reference Counting).
Handle¶
An actor handle contains the address of an actor along with its type information
and is required for sending messages to actors. The distinction between handles
and addresses—which is unique to CAF when comparing it to other actor
systems—is a consequence of the design decision to enforce static type
checking for all messages. Dynamically typed actors use actor
handles, while
statically typed actors use typed_actor<...>
handles. Both types have
strong reference semantics (see Reference Counting).
Pointer¶
In a few instances, CAF uses strong_actor_ptr
to refer to an actor using
strong reference semantics (see Reference Counting) without knowing the
proper handle type. Pointers must be converted to a handle via actor_cast
(see Converting Actor References with actor_cast) prior to sending messages. A strong_actor_ptr
can be
null.
Spawning¶
Spawning an actor means to create and run a new actor.
Monitor¶
A monitor is a unidirectional connection where one actor observes the lifetime of another actor. A monitored actor sends sends it exit reason to all actors monitoring it as part of its termination. This allows actors to supervise other actors and to take actions when one of the supervised actors fails, i.e., terminates with a non-normal exit reason.
Link¶
A link is a bidirectional connection between two actors. Each actor sends an exit message (see Exit Messages) to all of its links as part of its termination. Unlike down messages, exit messages cause the receiving actor to terminate as well when receiving a non-normal exit reason per default. This allows developers to create a set of actors with the guarantee that either all or no actors are alive. Actors can override the default handler to implement error recovery strategies.
Experimental Features¶
Sections that discuss experimental features are highlighted with experimental. The API of such features is not stable. This means even minor updates to CAF can come with breaking changes to the API or even remove a feature completely. However, we encourage developers to extensively test such features and to start discussions to uncover flaws, report bugs, or tweaking the API in order to improve a feature or streamline it to cover certain use cases.