Overview

Quasar is a library that provides high-performance lightweight threads, Go-like channels, Erlang-like actors, and other asynchronous programming tools for Java and Kotlin.

A good introduction to Quasar can be found in the blog post Erlang (and Go) in Clojure (and Java), Lightweight Threads, Channels and Actors for the JVM.

Quasar is developed by Parallel Universe and released as free software, dual-licensed under the Eclipse Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Dependencies

ASM — Java bytecode manipulation and analysis framework, by the ASM team

— Java bytecode manipulation and analysis framework, by the team Metrics — A measurement and monitoring library, by Coda Hale

Guava — Java utility classes, by Google

SLF4J — Simple Logging Facade for Java ( SLF4J )

Quasar’s clustering makes use of Galaxy, by Parallel Universe

Acknowledgments

A core component of Quasar, bytecode instrumentation, is a fork of the wonderful Continuations Library by Matthias Mann.

News

November 2, 2018

Quasar 0.8.0 has been released.

June 10, 2018

Quasar 0.7.10 has been released.

July 28, 2017

Quasar 0.7.9 has been released.

May 24, 2017

Quasar 0.7.8 has been released.

December 2, 2016

Quasar 0.7.7 has been released.

August 7, 2016

Quasar 0.7.6 has been released.

May 2, 2016

Quasar 0.7.5 has been released.

January 18, 2016

Quasar 0.7.4 has been released.

August 28, 2015

Quasar 0.7.3 has been released.

June 25, 2015

Quasar 0.7.2 has been released.

May 29, 2015

Quasar 0.7.0 has been released.

December 23, 2014

Quasar 0.6.2 has been released.

September 23, 2014

Quasar 0.6.1 has been released.

July 23, 2014

Quasar 0.6.0 has been released.

March 26, 2014

Quasar 0.5.0 has been released.

January 22, 2014

Quasar 0.4.0 has been released.

October 15, 2013

Quasar 0.3.0 has been released.

A new spaceships demo showcases Quasar’s (and SpaceBase’s) abilities.

July 19, 2013

Quasar/Pulsar 0.2.0 has been released.

May 2, 2013

Introductory blog post: Erlang (and Go) in Clojure (and Java), Lightweight Threads, Channels and Actors for the JVM.

Getting Started

System Requirements

As of version 0.8.0 Quasar runs on Java 11 and higher. Prior versions support JDK 7 and 8 (JDK 8 with the jdk8 classifier for the quasar-core component).

Note: We recommend using recent JDK builds as bugs in older releases can negatively affect your application.

Using Maven/Gradle

Add the following Maven/Gradle dependencies:

Feature Artifact Core (required) co.paralleluniverse:quasar-core:0.8.0 Actors co.paralleluniverse:quasar-actors:0.8.0 Reactive Streams co.paralleluniverse:quasar-reactive-streams:0.8.0 Kotlin co.paralleluniverse:quasar-kotlin:0.8.0

Instrumenting Your Code

Quasar fibers rely on bytecode instrumentation. This can be done at classloading time via a Java Agent, or at compilation time with an Ant task.

Running the Instrumentation Java Agent

Quasar’s lightweight thread implementation relies on bytecode instrumentation. Instrumentation can be performed at compilation time (detailed below) or at runtime using a Java agent. To run the Java agent, the following must be added to the java command line (or use your favorite build tool to add this as a JVM argument):

-javaagent:path-to-quasar-jar.jar

Specifying the Java Agent with Maven:

The best way to do this with Maven, as explained here, is:

First, setup the maven-dependency-plugin to always run the “properties” goal.

<plugin> <artifactId> maven-dependency-plugin </artifactId> <version> 2.5.1 </version> <executions> <execution> <id> getClasspathFilenames </id> <goals> <goal> properties </goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin>

Later on, use the property it sets as documented here with the form:

groupId:artifactId:type:[classifier]

For example, if you want to configure a maven exec task you could add the following in your build / plugins subsection:

<plugin> <groupId> org.codehaus.mojo </groupId> <artifactId> exec-maven-plugin </artifactId> <!-- Run with "mvn compile maven-dependency-plugin:properties exec:exec" --> <version> 1.3.2 </version> <configuration> <mainClass> testgrp.QuasarHelloWorld </mainClass> <workingDirectory> target/classes </workingDirectory> <executable> java </executable> <arguments> <!-- Turn off before production --> <argument> -Dco.paralleluniverse.fibers.verifyInstrumentation=true </argument> <!-- Quasar Agent --> <argument> -javaagent:${co.paralleluniverse:quasar-core:jar} </argument> <!-- Classpath --> <argument> -classpath </argument> <classpath/> <!-- Main class --> <argument> testgrp.QuasarIncreasingEchoApp </argument> </arguments> </configuration> </plugin>

To have the agent running during tests you could also add:

<plugin> <groupId> org.apache.maven.plugins </groupId> <artifactId> maven-surefire-plugin </artifactId> <version> 2.9 </version> <configuration> <argLine> -Dco.paralleluniverse.fibers.verifyInstrumentation=true </argLine> <!-- Quasar Agent --> <argLine> -javaagent:${co.paralleluniverse:quasar-core:jar} </argLine> </configuration> </plugin>

A Quasar Maven archetype is also available.

Specifying the Java Agent with Gradle

The way to do this with Gradle is as follows. Add a quasar configuration to your build.gradle file:

configurations { // ... quasar }

In your dependencies block, add:

dependencies { // .... quasar "co.paralleluniverse:quasar-core:0.8.0" }

Finally, in your run task (or any task of type JavaExec or Test ), add the system property:

jvmArgs "-javaagent:${configurations.quasar.iterator().next()}"

A Quasar Gradle template project is also available.

Ahead-of-Time ( AOT ) Instrumentation

The easy and preferable way to instrument programs using Quasar is with the Java agent, which instruments code at runtime. Sometimes, however, running a Java agent is not an option.

Quasar supports AOT instrumentation with an Ant task. The task is co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.InstrumentationTask found in quasar-core.jar , and it accepts a fileset of classes to instrument. Not all classes will actually be instrumented – only those with suspendable methods (see below) – so simply give the task all of the class files in your program. In fact, Quasar itself is instrumented ahead-of-time.

Building Quasar

Clone the repository:

git clone git://github.com/puniverse/quasar.git quasar

then install Gradle and run:

gradle

User Manual

Quasar Core

Fibers

Quasar’s chief contribution is that of the lightweight thread, called fiber in Quasar. Fibers provide functionality similar to threads, and a similar API, but they’re not managed by the OS. They are lightweight in terms of RAM (an idle fiber occupies ~400 bytes of RAM) and put a far lesser burden on the CPU when task-switching. You can have millions of fibers in an application. If you are familiar with Go, fibers are like goroutines. Fibers in Quasar are scheduled by one or more ForkJoinPools.

Fibers are not meant to replace threads in all circumstances. A fiber should be used when its body (the code it executes) blocks very often waiting on other fibers (e.g. waiting for messages sent by other fibers on a channel, or waiting for the value of a dataflow-variable). For long-running computations that rarely block, traditional threads are preferable. Fortunately, as we shall see, fibers and threads interoperate very well.

Fibers are especially useful for replacing callback-ridden asynchronous code. They allow you to enjoy the scalability and performance benefits of asynchronous code while keeping the simple to use and understand threaded model.

Using Fibers

A fiber is represented by the Fiber class. Similarly to a thread, you spawn a fiber like so:

new Fiber < V >() { @Override protected V run () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { // your code } }. start ();

There are several differences between this and starting a thread. First, a fiber can have a return value of the generic type V (we’ll shortly see how to use it). If your fiber does not need to return a value, use Void as the type for V , and return null from the run method. Second, the run method is allowed to throw an InterruptedException , (this is mostly a matter of convenience), as well as SuspendExecution which we’ll come back to.

You can also start a fiber by passing an instance of SuspendableRunnable or SuspendableCallable to Fiber ’s constructor:

new Fiber < Void >( new SuspendableRunnable () { public void run () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { // your code } }). start ();

You can join a fiber much as you’d do a thread with the join method. To obtain the value returned by the fiber (if any), you call the get method, which joins the fiber and returns its result.

Other than Fiber ’s constructor and start method, and possibly the join and get methods, you will not access the Fiber class directly much. To perform operations you would normally want to do on a thread, it is better to use the Strand class (discussed later), which is a generalizations of both threads and fibers.

When using Kotlin the fiber syntax in co.paralleluniverse.kotlin makes it even easier:

fiber @Suspendable { // The fiber will be created and will start executing this body }

The Scheduler and Monitoring

Fibers are scheduled by a FiberScheduler . When constructing a fiber, you can specify which scheduler should schedule it. If you don’t a default scheduler is used. You can set the default scheduler’s properties by setting some system properties.

The default scheduler is an instance of FiberForkJoinScheduler which schedules fibers in a ForkJoinPool . This is a high-quality work-stealing scheduler, but sometimes you might want to schedule fibers in a thread pool of your own design or even on a particular thread (e.g. AWT/Swing’s EDT). To that purpose you can use FiberExecutorScheduler . See the Javadoc for details.

Every scheduler creates a MXBean that monitors the fibers scheduled by that scheduler. The MXBean’s name is "co.paralleluniverse:type=Fibers,name=SCHEDULER_NAME" , and you can find more details in the Javadoc.

Runaway Fibers

A fiber that is stuck in a loop without blocking, or is blocking the thread its running on (by directly or indirectly performing a thread-blocking operation) is called a runaway fiber. It is perfectly OK for fibers to do that sporadically (as the work stealing scheduler will deal with that), but doing so frequently may severely impact system performance (as most of the scheduler’s threads might be tied up by runaway fibers). Quasar detects runaway fibers, and notifies you about which fibers are problematic, whether they’re blocking the thread or hogging the CPU, and gives you their stack trace, by printing this information to the console as well as reporting it to the runtime fiber monitor (exposed through a JMX MBean; see the previous section).

Note that this condition might happen when classes are encountered for the first time and need to be loaded from disk. This is alright because this happens only sporadically, but you may notice reports about problematic fibers during startup, as this when most class loading usually occurs.

If you wish to turn off runaway fiber detection, set the co.paralleluniverse.fibers.detectRunawayFibers system property to "false" .

“ThreadLocal”s in Fibers

Using ThreadLocal s in a fiber works as you’d expect – the values are local to the fiber. An InheritableThreadLocal inherits its value from the fiber’s parent, i.e. the thread or the fiber that spawned it.

“throws SuspendExecution”

The run methods in Fiber , SuspendableRunnable and SuspendableCallable declare that they may throw a SuspendExecution exception. This is not a real exception, but part of the inner working of fibers. Any method that may run in a fiber and may block, declares to throw this exception and is called a suspendable method. Transitively, when a method you write calls a suspendable method, it, too, becomes a suspendable method and must therefore declare to throw SuspendExecution . Adding SuspendExecution to the throws clause is convenient because it makes the compiler force you to add the exception to any method that calls your method, which you should.

Note: Sometimes a suspendable method can’t throw SuspendExecution and needs to be marked suspendable in other ways (for example if you’re overriding a method that doesn’t declare that exception) but this needs extra consideration. See Advanced Fibers for more information, including the parts about the @Suspendable annotation and suspendable libraries.

Note: Other than a few methods in the Fiber class that are usually only used internally, whenever you encounter a method that declares to throw SuspendExecution , it is safe to call by fibers as well as by regular threads. If used in a thread, it will never actually throw a SuspendExecution exception, so it is best to declare a catch(SuspendExecution e) block when called on a regular thread, and just throw an AssertionError , as it should never happen.

Suspendables: special cases

Quasar supports JDK’s interface-based dynamic proxies out-of-the-box.

Reflective calls are always considered suspendable. This is because the target method is computed at runtime, so there’s no general way of telling if it’s going to call a suspendable method or not before execution.

Java 8 lambdas too are always considered suspendable. This is because they can’t declare checked exceptions, they are ultimately linked (via invokedynamic ) to synthethic static methods that can’t be annotated and it is difficult to tell at instrumentation time if lambdas implement a suspendable interface.

Quasar will reject with an error any attempt to mark special methods (that is, constructors and class initializers) as suspendable. This is because suspending in an initializer could expose objects or classes before they’re fully initialized and this is an error-prone, difficult-to-troubleshoot situation that can always (and must) be avoided.

If you want to know more about marking methods in libraries and in the JDK as suspendable, please refer to the suspendable libraries advanced section.

“synchronized” in Fibers

Because synchronized blocks or methods block the kernel threads, by default they are not allowed in fibers. Suspendable methods that are marked synchronized or contain synchronized blocks will cause Quasar instrumentation to fail. However, Quasar can gracefully handle the occasional blocked thread, so synchronized methods/blocks can be allowed by passing the m argument to the Quasar Java agent, or by setting the allowMonitors property on the instrumentation Ant task.

Blocking “Thread” calls

These methods too block the kernel threads too and by default they are not allowed in fibers, causing Quasar instrumentation to fail. However, Quasar can gracefully handle these calls if they happen occasionally, so they can be allowed by passing the b argument to the Quasar Java agent, or by setting the allowBlocking property on the instrumentation Ant task.

Strands

A strand (represented by the Strand class) is an abstraction for both fibers and threads; in short – a strand is either a fiber or a thread. The Strand class provides many useful methods. Strand.currentStrand() returns the current running strand (be it a fiber or a thread); Strand.sleep() suspends the current strand for the given number of milliseconds; getStackTrace returns the current stack trace of the strand. To learn more about what operations you can perform on strands, please consult the Javadoc.

“park” and “unpark”

Most importantly (though relevant only for power-users who would like to implement their own concurrency primitives, such as locks), the Strand class contains the methods park and unpark , that delegate to Fiber.park and Fiber.unpark methods if the strand is a fiber, or to LockSupport ’s park and unpark methods if the strand is a thread ( LockSupport lies at the core of all java.util.concurrent classes). This allows to create synchronization mechanisms that work well for both fibers and threads.

Just as you almost never use LockSupport directly, so, too, you will never need to call Strand.park or Strand.unpark , unless you’re writing your own concurrency constructs (like a new kind of lock).

Note: only a strand (thread or fiber) can park itself and only another strand can unpark a parked one.

Any Async to Fiber-Blocking

As we said above, fibers are great as a replacement for callbacks. The FiberAsync class helps us easily turn any callback-based asynchronous operation to as simple fiber-blocking call.

Assume that operation Foo.asyncOp(FooCompletion callback) is an asynchronous operation, where FooCompletion is defined as:

interface FooCompletion { void success ( String result ); void failure ( FooException exception ); }

We then define the following subclass of FiberAsync :

class FooAsync extends FiberAsync < String , FooException > implements FooCompletion { @Override public void success ( String result ) { asyncCompleted ( result ); } @Override public void failure ( FooException exception ) { asyncFailed ( exception ); } }

Then, to transform the operation to a fiber-blocking one, we can define:

String op () { new FooAsync () { protected void requestAsync () { Foo . asyncOp ( this ); } }. run (); }

The call to run will block the fiber until the operation completes.

Note: each FiberAsync instance will be linked to the invoking fiber upon construction and it will maintain internal state for a single operation. This means that it needs to be both created and run by the invoking fiber and it can be used for a single operation call only (that is, it cannot be re-used for further calls).

Transforming asynchronous code to fiber-blocking calls has a negligible overhead both in terms of memory and performance, while making the code shorter and far simpler to understand.

Advanced Fiber Usage

Fiber Internals

We will now cover in some depth the inner workings of Quasar fibers. You should read this section if you’d like to annotate suspendable methods with the @Suspendable annotation rather than by declaring throws SuspendExecution , or if you’re just curious.

Internally, a fiber is a continuation which is then scheduled in a scheduler. A continuation captures the instantaneous state of a computation, and allows it to be suspended and then resumed at a later time from the point where it was suspended. Quasar creates continuations by instrumenting (at the bytecode level) suspendable methods. For scheduling, Quasar uses ForkJoinPool , which is a very efficient, work-stealing, multi-threaded scheduler.

Whenever a class is loaded, Quasar’s instrumentation module (usually run as a Java agent) scans it for suspendable methods. Every suspendable method f is then instrumented in the following way: It is scanned for calls to other suspendable methods. For every call to a suspendable method g , some code is inserted before (and after) the call to g that saves (and restores) the state of a local variables to the fiber’s stack (a fiber manages its own stack), and records the fact that this (i.e. the call to g ) is a possible suspension point. At the end of this “suspendable function chain”, we’ll find a call to Fiber.park . park suspends the fiber by throwing a SuspendExecution exception (which the instrumentation prevents you from catching, even if your method contains a catch(Throwable t) block).

If g indeed blocks, the SuspendExecution exception will be caught by the Fiber class. When the fiber is awakened (with unpark ), method f will be called, and then the execution record will show that we’re blocked at the call to g , so we’ll immediately jump to the line in f where g is called, and call it. Finally, we’ll reach the actual suspension point (the call to park ), where we’ll resume execution immediately following the call. When g returns, the code inserted in f will restore f ’s local variables from the fiber stack.

This process sounds complicated, but its incurs a performance overhead of no more than 3%-5%.

“@Suspendable”

So far, our way to specify a suspendable method is by declaring throws SuspendExecution . This is convenient because SuspendExecution is a checked exception, so if f calls g and g is suspendable, the Java compiler will force us to declare that f is suspendable (and it must be because it calls g and g might be suspended).

Sometimes, however, we cannot declare f to throw SuspendExecution . One example is that f is an implementation of an interface method, and we cannot (or don’t want to) change the interface so that it throws SuspendExecution . It is also possible that we want f to be run in regular threads as well as fibers.

An example for that are the synchronization primitives in the co.paralleluniverse.strands.concurrent package, which implement interfaces declared in java.util.concurrent , and we want to maintain compatibility. Also, no harm will come if we use these classes in regular threads. They will work just as well for threads as for fibers, because internally they call Strand.park which is fiber-blocking (suspends) if run in a fiber, but simply blocks the thread if not.

So, suppose method f is declared in interface I , and we’d like to make its implementation in class C suspendable. The compiler will not let us declare that we throw SuspendExecution because that will conflict with f ’s declaration in I .

What we do, then, is annotate C.f with the @Suspendable annotation (in the co.paralleluniverse.fibers package). Assuming C.f calls park or some other suspendable method g – which does declare throws SuspendExecution , we need to surround f ’s body with try {} catch(SuspendExecution) just so the method will compile, like so:

class C implements I { @Suspendable public int f () { try { // do some stuff return g () * 2 ; } catch ( SuspendExecution s ) { throw new AssertionError ( s ); } } }

The catch block will never be executed; the instrumentation will take care of that.

But now let’s consider method h :

@Suspendable public void h ( I x ) { x . f (); }

First, if we want to run h in a fiber, then it must be suspendable because it calls f which is suspendable. We could designate h as suspendable either by annotating it with @Suspendable or by declaring throws SuspendExecution (even though f is not declared to throw SuspendExecution ).

When h is encountered by the instrumentation module, it will be instrumented because it’s marked suspendable, but in order for the instrumentation to work, it needs to know of h ’s calls to other instrumented methods. h calls f , which is suspendable, but through its interface I , while we’ve only annotated f ’s implementation in class C. The instrumenter does not know that I.f has an implementation that might suspend.

Therefore, if you’d like to use the @Suspendable annotation, there’s a step to be added to your build step, after compilation and before creating the jar file: running the co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.SuspendablesScanner Ant task. In Gradle it looks like this:

ant . taskdef ( name: 'scanSuspendables' , classname: 'co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.SuspendablesScanner' , classpath: "build/classes/main:build/resources/main:${configurations.runtime.asPath}" ) ant . scanSuspendables ( auto: false , suspendablesFile: "$sourceSets.main.output.resourcesDir/META-INF/suspendables" , supersFile: "$sourceSets.main.output.resourcesDir/META-INF/suspendable-supers" ) { fileset ( dir: sourceSets . main . output . classesDir ) }

SuspendablesScanner scans your code after it’s been compiled for methods annotated with @Suspendable . In our example it will find C.f . It will then see that C.f is an implementation of I.f , and so it will list I.f in a text file ( META-INF/suspendable-supers ), that contains all methods that have overriding suspendable implementations.

When the instrumentation module instruments h , it will find I.f in the file, and, knowing it might suspend, inject the appropriate code.

Note that this has no effect on other calls to I.f . The instrumentation module only cares that I.f has suspendable implementations when it finds it called in suspendable methods (in our case: h ).

When using AOT instrumentation, InstrumentationTask must be able to find META-INF/suspendable-supers in its classpath.

Of course if you don’t want to use SuspendablesScanner you can also add entries to META-INF/suspendable-supers manually.

Auto Suspendables Detection

Quasar supports automatic detection of suspendable methods, without manually marking them at all. The build-time SuspendableScanner ant task can be configured to automatically find suspendable methods by analyzing the call graph:

ant . taskdef ( name: 'scanSuspendables' , classname: 'co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.SuspendablesScanner' , classpath: "build/classes/main:build/resources/main:${configurations.runtime.asPath}" ) ant . scanSuspendables ( auto: true , suspendablesFile: "$sourceSets.main.output.resourcesDir/META-INF/suspendables" , supersFile: "$sourceSets.main.output.resourcesDir/META-INF/suspendable-supers" ) { fileset ( dir: sourceSets . main . output . classesDir ) }

This will create a META-INF/suspendables file containing the names of the suspendable methods.

When using AOT instrumentation, InstrumentationTask must be able to find META-INF/suspendables and META-INF/suspendable-supers in its classpath.

Automatic detection of suspendable methods is currently a build-time static analysis tool, which means it must reason conservatively and so it could end up instrumenting more than necessary: for example, think of all call sites to Runnable.run being instrumented only because there’s one suspendable implementation out of 20 that are not.

Fiber Serialization

Fibers can be serialized while parked, and then deserialized an unparked to continue where they left off. The parkAndSerialize method parks the currently running fiber, and then calls the passed callback, which can serialize the fiber (or any object graph containing the fiber) into a byte array using the supplied serializer.

The unparkSerialized method deserializes the serialized representation of the fiber, and unparks it. You can deserialize the byte array using the serializer returned from the getFiberSerializer method, and pass the (uninitialized, unparked) deserialized fiber to the unparkDeserialized method. The latter approach is necessary if the serialized fiber is part of a bigger object graph serialized in the byte array.

Suspendables in Libraries

Sometimes you want to use library methods that will end up calling your suspendable code, so they too must be marked suspendable and instrumented.

If you don’t own/control them or annotating them with throws SuspendExecution / @Suspendable is just impractical, you can instead list them, one method per line, in two text resources: concrete suspendable methods should appear in META-INF/suspendables and non-suspendable methods that could have suspendable overrides (be they concrete but non-final, interface or abstract) should appear instead in META-INF/suspendable-supers .

All entries should have the form “full.class.name.methodName” and * glob patterns can be used for the method part, as well as full JVM signatures (if you want to specify that only some overrides must be instrumented).

SuspendablesScanner will automatically add your entries to its output.

Methods in the java.lang package are dealt with by Quasar internals and it’s not possible to mark them as suspendable in any way. Other JDK methods can be made explicitly suspendable by listing them in the META-INF/suspendables and META-INF/suspendable-supers resources and by setting the co.paralleluniverse.fibers.allowJdkInstrumentation system property to true but there should rarely be, if ever, a need to do so. If you think you need it we suggest you first get in touch and discuss your case.

Troubleshooting Intro

Quasar relies on JVM bytecode instrumentation but there’s one limitation at present: suspendable methods have to be marked before execution by analysis tools or by the developer.

Note: work is ongoing with the OpenJDK team that will allow to remove this restriction completely starting with a JDK9 version of Quasar: efficient, automatic runtime instrumentation will be performed at the bytecode level, that is for all code written in any JVM language, without need anymore for annotations nor instrumentation plugins.

If you forget to mark a method as suspendable (with throws SuspendExecution or @Suspendable or the META-INF/suspendables / META-INF/suspendable-supers resources), you will encounter some strange or nonsensical errors, close to the point where the instrumentation missing, that can take the form of ClassCastException s, NullPointerException s, ArrayIndexOutOfBounds or SuspendExecution being thrown from within Quasar or from user code (actually they are thrown by instructions added by instrumentation that are not visible in the source code). Since an uninstrumented method lacks the ability to jump after the resume point, infinite loops are also possible.

Luckily Quasar also provides a lot of troubleshooting tools that can be enabled only when needed and that will tell precisely where and why instrumentation is incomplete: we’re going to cover them in the next few paragraphs.

Catching the culprit

Troubleshooting incomplete instrumentation requires the source code involved in the instrumentation issue, enabling instrumentation verification and, in few cases, enabling instrumentation traces.

First set the value of the co.paralleluniverse.fibers.verifyInstrumentation system property to true and run your program. This will verify that all of your potentially suspendable calls in your suspendable-marked methods are properly instrumented, else a warning will be printed to the console letting you know which weren’t.

Note: do not turn on verifyInstrumentation in production, as it will slow down your code considerably: a warning will be printed whe the application starts in order to remind you of that.

Instrumentation problems usually result from forgetting to mark methods as suspendable, but also look for UnableToInstrumentException stack traces: they list the methods that Quasar refused to instrument by default because of synchronization or thread-blocking Thread calls (see the sections about synchronized and the one about blocking Thread calls for information about how to override these defaults).

If you still don’t understand why there are uninstrumented calls or methods, you can also turn on the instrumentation traces, as well as additional checks, by adding respectively the v , d and c arguments to the Java agent (the corresponding AOT instrumentation task options are verbose , debug and check respectively). This will print thoroughly all the steps of Quasar’s instrumentation process, including which methods calls are considered suspendable (or aren’t, and why) and which are actually instrumented (or aren’t, and why).

Also consider that, for the sake of efficiency, Quasar will instrument a method marked as suspendable only if it can find at least one suspendable call in its body, so if a marked method is detected as uninstrumented and is not mentioned in an UnableToInstrumentException , then it probably means that Quasar couldn’t find any suspendable call in it. This can cause several marked methods in a call chain not to be instrumented because of a “chain reaction” but instrumentation verification and instrumentation traces will expose the problem with precision.

Another common reason for difficult-to-troubleshoot instrumentation issues is forgetting to mark abstract, interface or overridden methods as suspendable: if a suspendable-marked concrete method calls an unmarked “super” method, even if all its implementations (or overrides) are correctly marked as suspendable, Quasar will not be able to see that a (potentially) suspendable call is being performed.

Note: Quasar’s’ instrumentation and its diagnostic tools have been battle-tested, so while it’s still possible that you’ve just found a bug in instrumentation or troubleshooting tools, this is quite unlikely: follow through the whole troubleshooting guide and you’ll most probably find the issue very quickly. If you don’t, read Getting Help.

Troubleshooting Crash Course

Let’s consider the following short program:

public class Program { public static void main ( String [] args ) throws ExecutionException , InterruptedException { final Commands c = new Commands (); FiberUtil . runInFiber ( c: : mySuspendableMethod1 ); } Program () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { Fiber . sleep ( 10 ); } private static class Commands { private void mySuspendableMethod1 () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { myMarkedSyncMethod (); myMarkedThreadBlockingMethod (); myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 (); } private synchronized void myMarkedSyncMethod () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { Fiber . sleep ( 10 ); } private void myMarkedThreadBlockingMethod () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { Thread . sleep ( 10 ); } private void myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 () { mySuspendableMethod3 (); } interface MyUnmarkedInterface { void myUnmarkedSuspendableInterfaceMethod (); } @Suspendable private void mySuspendableMethod3 () { MyUnmarkedInterface i = init (); i . myUnmarkedSuspendableInterfaceMethod (); } private MyUnmarkedInterface init () { return new MyUnmarkedInterface () { @Override @Suspendable public void myUnmarkedSuspendableInterfaceMethod () { try { Fiber . sleep ( 10 ); } catch ( Throwable t ) { Exceptions . rethrow ( t ); } } }; } } }

When you run the program it just seems to get stuck, so let’s see if there are instrumentation-related issues and let’s fix them.

Note: Quasar works at the JVM bytecode level so its diagnostic messages use JVM terminology and notation rather than Java’s. You’ll familiarize very quickly with them, the most unusual notation being probably JVM type signaturess.

Quasar will alert you very soon after the application starts (on stderr ) that some methods that can’t be instrumented:

co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.UnableToInstrumentException: Unable to instrument test/troubleshooting/Program# ()V because of special method ... co.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.UnableToInstrumentException: Unable to instrument test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands#myMarkedSyncMethod()V because of synchronization

For now we’ll fix that by simply removing the (unused) constructor and by removing the synchronized modifier but in real situations the constructor’s suspendable parts would probable become a (suspendable) initialization method; as for synchronized methods (and/or blocks) there are several options, for example using Quasar’s port of java.util.concurrent instead, or just telling Quasar to instrument them anyway through the m agent argument (but do that only if you’re sure that the lock will be held for a very short time).

After doing that, a new run yields:

o.paralleluniverse.fibers.instrument.UnableToInstrumentException: Unable to instrument test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands#myMarkedThreadBlockingMethod()V because of blocking call to java/lang/Thread#sleep(J)V

We’ll solve this further problem by Using Strand.sleep instead, which works for both fibers and threads (another option is telling Quasar to instrument anyway via the b agent argument but do that only if you’re sure that the thread will block for a very short time).

When we run again there are no message errors but the program still hangs, so it’s time to turn on instrumentation verification by adding the -Dco.paralleluniverse.fibers.verifyInstrumentation=true command line option.

Now an interesting verification stacktrace is getting printed over and over (which also tells us that a fiber can’t resume correctly after suspending, and instead some uninstrumented method is being restarted). This is the verification stacktrace:

[quasar] WARNING: Uninstrumented methods (marked '**') or call-sites (marked '!!') detected on the call stack: at co.paralleluniverse.common.util.ExtendedStackTrace.here (ExtendedStackTrace.java:44 bci: 8) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.checkInstrumentation (Fiber.java:1668 bci: 0) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.verifySuspend (Fiber.java:1641 bci: 6) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.verifySuspend (Fiber.java:1636 bci: 3) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.sleep (Fiber.java:672 bci: 0) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.sleep (Fiber.java:664 bci: 4) at test.troubleshooting.Program$Commands$1.myUnmarkedSuspendableInterfaceMethod) (Program.java:57 bci: 72) at test.troubleshooting.Program$Commands.mySuspendableMethod3) (Program.java:48 bci: 6) ** at test.troubleshooting.Program$Commands.myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 (Program.java:38 bci: 1) ** at test.troubleshooting.Program$Commands.mySuspendableMethod1 (Program.java:24 bci: 110) !! (instrumented suspendable calls at: [23, 24]) at test.troubleshooting.Program$Commands.access$100 (Program.java:19 bci: 1) (optimized) at test.troubleshooting.Program.lambda$main$dedc733e$1 (Program.java:16 bci: 1) (optimized) at co.paralleluniverse.strands.SuspendableUtils$VoidSuspendableCallable.run (SuspendableUtils.java:44 bci: 4) at co.paralleluniverse.strands.SuspendableUtils$VoidSuspendableCallable.run (SuspendableUtils.java:32 bci: 1) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.run (Fiber.java:1072 bci: 11) at co.paralleluniverse.fibers.Fiber.run1 (Fiber.java:1067 bci: 1)

The verification is telling us that mySuspendable1 is partially instrumented, and specifically the call to myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 is not instrumented. Well, since myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 is not marked as suspendable (and is thus also fully uninstrumented) this shouldn’t come as a surprise: let’s add @Suspendable to myUnmarkedSuspendableMethod2 .

It tells us that mySuspendableMethod3 is not instrumented at all either. Why is that, considering that it calls a method of an anonymous implementation of MyUnmarkedInterface that seems correctly instrumented? This is because it calls it through its interface type, which is unmarked instead, so Quasar doesn’t know that the call must be instrumented. In addition, there are no other suspendable calls in mySuspendable3 so it doesn’t get instrumented at all. Indeed, if we turn on the instrumentation trace by adding the =vdc suffix to the agent before fixing that, we see that Quasar doesn’t find any suspendable calls in mySuspendableMethod3 :

[quasar] INFO: Method test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands#mySuspendableMethod3 suspendable: SUSPENDABLE (markedSuspendable: SUSPENDABLE setSuspendable: null) ... [quasar] INFO: About to instrument method test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands#mySuspendableMethod3()V [quasar] INFO: Reading class: test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands$MyUnmarkedInterface [quasar] INFO: Nothing to instrument in method test/troubleshooting/Program$Commands#mySuspendableMethod3()V

We’re going to fix that by adding @Suspendable to MyUnmarkedInterface.myUnmarkedSuspendableInterfaceMethod() as well. Afterwards a new run will now go through and complete without any errors. Well done!

Manual troubleshooting

You can also verify instrumentation manually by checking the code mentioned in the stack trace of the “strange” exception, proceeding from top to bottom, possibly with the help of instrumentation traces. If your program gets stuck instead, try to figure out with a debugger where there’s a restarting method and use that stack as a reference. If you can’t find the culprit then consider asking for help.

Debugging

Since Quasar fibers are scheduled on threads and have a stack, they can be debugged just like Java threads and this makes things much easier compared to, for example, async APIs. Sometimes, due to extra calls inserted during instrumentation and not present in the source code, if you step while debugging you could enter Stack methods or other Quasar internal methods: in these cases just add a breakpoint to the next user code line you’re interested in and continue execution.

Note: in the future Quasar will also offer specific debugging support to increase debugging ergonomy and comfort in such circumstances.

Getting Help

If you’re stuck with an instrumentation issue you don’t understand, for example there are uninstrumented methods and/or call sites but you can’t understand why or you get strange exceptions without any uninstrumented reports, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Quasar/Pulsar user group and, if possible, provide a small project including the build and run commands as well as minimal (as much as possible) code that reproduces the problem, together with the instrumentation verification stacktrace(s) (if any) and/or “strange” exception stacktraces. If you can’t post the information publicly then consider reaching out to the Quasar team members with a private email.

As a last choice, share only the information you can but consider that this could make finding the problem harder: as we’ve just seen, effective instrumentation troubleshooting usually requires at least the involved code and instrumentation verification stacktraces.

If you’re fairly sure you found a bug then don’t hesitate to open a new GitHub issue but don’t forget to first search the user group and the already open tickets for problems similar to yours.

Channels

Channels are queues used to pass messages between strands (remember, strands are a general name for threads and fibers). If you are familiar with Go, Quasar channels are like Go channels.

A channel is an interface that extends two other interfaces: SendPort , which defines the methods used to send messages to a channel, and ReceivePort , which defines the methods used to receive messages from a channel.

Channels are normally created by calling any of the newChannel static methods of the Channels class. The newChannel methods create a channel with a specified set of properties. Those properties are:

bufferSize – if positive, the number of messages that the channel can hold in an internal buffer; 0 for a transfer channel, i.e. a channel with no internal buffer. or -1 for a channel with an unbounded (infinite) buffer.

– if positive, the number of messages that the channel can hold in an internal buffer; for a transfer channel, i.e. a channel with no internal buffer. or for a channel with an unbounded (infinite) buffer. policy – the OverflowPolicy specifying how the channel (if bounded) will behave if its internal buffer overflows.

– the specifying how the channel (if bounded) will behave if its internal buffer overflows. singleProducer – whether the channel will be used by a single producer strand.

– whether the channel will be used by a single producer strand. singleConsumer – whether the channel will be used by a single consumer strand.

Note that not all property combinations are supported. Consult the Javadoc for details.

Sending and Receiving Messages

Messages are sent to a channel using the SendPort.send method. The send method blocks if the channel’s buffer is full and the channel has been configured with the BLOCK overflow policy. There are versions of send that block indefinitely or up to a given timeout, and the trySend method sends a message if the channel’s buffer has room, or returns immediately, without blocking, if not. Consult the Javadoc for details.

Messages are received from a channel using the ReceivePort.receive method. There are versions of receive that block indefinitely or up to a given timeout, and the tryReceive method receives a message if one is available, or returns immediately, without blocking, if not. Consult the Javadoc for details.

A channel can be closed with the close method, found in both ReceivePort and SendPort . All messages sent to the channel after the close method has been called will be silently ignored, but all those sent before will still be available (when calling receive ). After all messages sent before the channel closed are consumed, the receive function will return null , and ReceivePort.isClosed() will return true .

Note: As usual, while the blocking channel methods declare to throw SuspendExecution , this exception will never actually be thrown. If using channels in a plain thread, you should catch(SuspendExecution e) { throw AssertionError(); } . Alternatively, you can use the convenience wrappers ThreadReceivePort and ThreadSendPort .

Primitive Channels

Quasar provides 4 types of channels for primitive data types: int , long , float and double . Consult the Javadoc of, for example, IntSendPort IntReceivePort and for details.

All primitive channels do not support multiple consumers.

Ticker Channels

A channel created with the DISPLACE overflow policy is called a ticker channel because it provides guarantees similar to that of a digital stock-ticker: you can start watching at any time, the messages you read are always read in order, but because of the limited screen size, if you look away or read to slowly you may miss some messages.

The ticker channel is useful when a program component continually broadcasts some information. The size channel’s circular buffer, its “screen” if you like, gives the subscribers some leeway if they occasionally fall behind reading.

A ticker channel is single-consumer, i.e. only one strand is allowed to consume messages from the channel. On the other hand, it is possible, and useful, to create several views of the channel, each used by a different consumer strand. A view (which is of type TickerChannelConsumer ) is created with the Channels.newTickerConsumerFor method.

The method returns a ReceivePort that can be used to receive messages from channel . Each ticker-consumer will yield monotonic messages, namely no message will be received more than once, and the messages will be received in the order they’re sent, but if the consumer is too slow, messages could be lost.

Each consumer strand will use its own ticker-consumer , and each can consume messages at its own pace, and each TickerChannelConsumer port will return the same messages (messages consumed from one will not be removed from the other views), subject possibly to different messages being missed by different consumers depending on their pace.

Transforming Channels ( AKA Reactive Extensions)

The Channels class has several static methods that can be used to manipulate and compose values sent to or received off channels:

map - returns a channel that transforms messages by applying a given mapping function. There are two versions of map : one that operates on ReceivePort and one that operates on SendPort .

- returns a channel that transforms messages by applying a given mapping function. There are two versions of : one that operates on and one that operates on . filter - returns a channel that only lets messages that satisfy a predicate through. There are two versions of filter : one that operates on ReceivePort and one that operates on SendPort .

- returns a channel that only lets messages that satisfy a predicate through. There are two versions of : one that operates on and one that operates on . flatMap - returns a channel that transforms any message into a new channel whose messages are then concatenated into the returned channel. There are two versions of flatMap : one that operates on ReceivePort and one that operates on SendPort .

- returns a channel that transforms any message into a new channel whose messages are then concatenated into the returned channel. There are two versions of : one that operates on and one that operates on . reduce - returns a channel that transforms messages by applying a given reducing function. There are two versions of reduce : one that operates on ReceivePort and one that operates on SendPort .

- returns a channel that transforms messages by applying a given reducing function. There are two versions of : one that operates on and one that operates on . zip - returns a channel that combines each vector of messages from a vector of channels into a single combined message.

- returns a channel that combines each vector of messages from a vector of channels into a single combined message. take - returns a channel that allows receiving at most N messages from another channel before being automatically closed.

- returns a channel that allows receiving at most N messages from another channel before being automatically closed. group - returns a channel that funnels messages from a set of given channels and supports its atomic dynamic reconfiguration as well as setting mute, pause and solo states for a subset of it (similarly to core.async’s mix ).

The fiberTransform method can perform any imperative channel transformation by running transformation code in a new dedicated fiber. The transformation reads messages from an input channels and writes messages to the output channel. When the transformation terminates, the output channel is automatically closed.

Here’s an example of fiberTransform using Java 8 syntax:

Channels . fiberTransform ( Channels . newTickerConsumerFor ( t ), avg , ( DoubleReceivePort in , SendPort < Double > out ) -> { try { double [] window = new double [ WINDOW_SIZE ]; long i = 0 ; for (;;) { window [( int ) ( i ++ % WINDOW_SIZE )] = in . receiveDouble (); out . send ( Arrays . stream ( window ). average (). getAsDouble ()); } } catch ( ReceivePort . EOFException e ) { } });

transform and transformSend wrap a ReceivePort or a SendPort respectively, with a fluent interface for all the transformations covered in this section.

Channel Selection

A powerful tool when working with channels is the ability to wait on several channel operations at once. If you are familiar with the Go programming language, this capability is provided by the select statement.

The Selector class exposes several static methods that allow channel selection. The basic idea is this: you declare several channel operations (sends and receives), each possibly operating on a different channel, and then use Selector to perform at most one.

Here is an example of using Selector . For details, please consult the Javadoc:

SelectAction sa = Selector . select ( Selector . receive ( ch1 ), Selector . send ( ch2 , msg ));

The example will do exactly one of the following operations: send msg to ch1 or receive a message from ch2 .

A very concise select syntax for Kotlin is available in the co.paralleluniverse.kotlin package:

val ch1 = Channels . newChannel < Int >( 1 ) val ch2 = Channels . newChannel < Int >( 1 ) assertTrue ( fiber @Suspendable { select ( Receive ( ch1 ), Send ( ch2 , 2 )) { it } }. get () is Send ) ch1 . send ( 1 ) assertTrue ( fiber @Suspendable { select ( Receive ( ch1 ), Send ( ch2 , 2 )) { when ( it ) { is Receive -> it . msg is Send -> 0 else -> - 1 } } }. get () == 1 )}

Dataflow (Reactive)

Dataflow, or reactive programming, is a computation described by composing variables whose value may be set (and possibly changed) at any given time, without concern for when these values are set. Quasar provides two dataflow primitives: Val and Var in the co.paralleluniverse.strands.dataflow package.

A Val is a dataflow constant. It can have its value set once, and read multiple times. Attempting to read the value of a Val before it’s been set, will block until a value is set.

Vals can also be used as a simple and effective strand coordination mechanism. Val implements j.u.c.Future .

A Var is a dataflow variable. It can have it’s value set multiple times, and every new value can trigger the re-computation of other Vars. You can set a Var to retain historical values (consult the Javadoc for more information).

Here is a simple example of using Vals and Vars.

Val < Integer > a = new Val <>(); Var < Integer > x = new Var <>(); Var < Integer > y = new Var <>(() -> a . get () * x . get ()); Var < Integer > z = new Var <>(() -> a . get () + x . get ()); Var < Integer > r = new Var <>(() -> { int res = y . get () + z . get (); System . out . println ( "res: " + res ); return res ; }); Fiber <?> f = new Fiber < Void >(() -> { for ( int i = 0 ; i < 200 ; i ++) { x . set ( i ); Strand . sleep ( 100 ); } }). start (); Strand . sleep ( 2000 ); a . set ( 3 ); // this will trigger everything f . join ();

In this examples, vars y and z , are dependent on val a and var x , and will have their values recomputed – after a is set – whenever x changes.

Quasar’s Actor System

To use the terms we’ve learned so far, an actor is a strand that owns a single channel with some added lifecycle management and error handling. But this reductionist view of actors does them little justice. Actors are fundamental building blocks that are combined to build a fault-tolerant application. If you are familiar with Erlang, Quasar actors are just like Erlang processes.

An actor is a self-contained execution unit with well-defined inputs and outputs. Actors communicate with other actors (as well as regular program threads and fibers) by passing messages.

Note: Actors may write to and read from channels other than their own mailbox. In fact, actors can do whatever regular fibers can.

Creating Actors

All actors extends the Actor class. The constructor takes the actor’s name (which does not have to be unique, and may even be null ), and its mailbox settings (of type MailboxConfig ).

MailboxConfig defines the mailbox size (the number of messages that can wait in the mailbox channel), with -1 specifying an unbounded mailbox, and an overflow policy. The overflow policy is currently ignored. If the mailbox capacity is exceeded, an exception will be thrown inside the receiving actor when the actor next blocks on a receive .

An actor is required to implement the doRun method. This method is the actor body, and is run when the actor is spawned.

It is preferable to subclass BasicActor rather than Actor ; BasicActor provides the ability to perform selective receives (more on that later).

Spawning Actors

Actors can run in any strand – fiber or thread, although you’d usually want to run them in fibers. Actor implements SuspendableCallable so you may run it by setting it as the target of a fiber or a thread (via Strand.toRunnable(SuspendableCallable)) ). A simpler way to start an actor is by calling

actor . spawn ()

which assigns the actor to a newly created fiber and starts it, or

actor . spawnThread ()

which assigns the actor to a newly created thread and starts.

An actor can be join ed, just like a fiber. Calling get on an actor will join it and return the value returned by doRun .

Note: Just like fibers, spawning an actor is a very cheap operation in both computation and memory. Do not fear creating many (thousands, tens-of-thousands or even hundreds-of-thousands) actors.

Sending and Receiving Messages, ActorRef

The spawn method returns an instance of ActorRef . All (almost) interactions with an actor take place through its ActorRef , which can also be obtained by calling ref() on the actor. The ActorRef is used as a level of indirection that provides additional isolation for the actor (and actors are all about isolation). It enables things like hot code swapping and more.

ActorRef.self() is a static function that returns the currently executing actor’s ref, and Actor.self() is a protected member function that returns an actor’s ref. Use them to obtain and share an actor’s ref with other actors.

Note: An actor must never pass a direct reference to itself to other actors or to be used on other strands. However, it may share its ActorRef freely. In fact, no class should hold a direct Java reference to an actor object other than classes that are part of the actor.

The ActorRef allows sending messages to the actor’s mailbox. In fact, ActorRef implements SendPort so it can be used just like a channel.

An actor receives a message by calling the receive method. The method blocks until a message is available in the mailbox, and then returns it. Another version of receive blocks up to a given duration, and returns null if no message is received by that time.

Normally, an actor is implements a loop similar to this one:

@Override protected Void doRun () { for (;;) { Object msg = receive (); // process message if ( thatsIt ()) break ; } return null ; }

Note: Because messages can be read by the actor at any time, you must take great care to only send messages that are immutable, or, at the very least, ensure that the sender does not retain a reference to the message after it is sent. Failing to do so may result in nasty race-condition bugs.

Actors vs. Channels

One of the reasons of providing a different receive function for actors is because programming with actors is conceptually different from just using fibers and channels. I think of channels as hoses pumping data into a function, or as sort of like asynchronous parameters. A fiber may pull many different kinds of data from many different channels, and combine the data in some way.

Actors are a different abstraction. They are more like objects in object-oriented languages, assigned to a single thread. The mailbox serves as the object’s dispatch mechanism; it’s not a hose but a switchboard. It’s for this reason that actors often need to pattern-match their mailbox messages, while regular channels – each usually serving as a conduit for a single kind of data – don’t.

Selective Receive

An actor is a state machine. It usually encompasses some state and the messages it receives trigger state transitions. But because the actor has no control over which messages it receives and when (which can be a result of either other actors’ behavior, or even the way the OS schedules threads), an actor would be required to process any message and any state, and build a full state transition matrix, namely how to transition whenever any messages is received at any state.

This can not only lead to code explosion; it can lead to bugs. The key to managing a complex state machine is by not handling messages in the order they arrive, but in the order we wish to process them. If your actor extends BasicActor , there’s another form of the receive method that allows for selective receive. This method takes an instance of MessageProcessor , which selects messages out of the mailbox (a message is selected iff MessageProcessor.process returns a non-null value when it is passed the message). Alternatively (to extending BasicActor , you can make use of the SelectiveReceiveHelper class.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose we have this message class:

class ComplexMessage { enum Type { FOO , BAR , BAZ , WAT } final Type type ; final int num ; public ComplexMessage ( Type type , int num ) { this . type = type ; this . num = num ; } }

Then, this call:

ComplexMessage m = receive ( new MessageProcessor < ComplexMessage , ComplexMessage >() { public ComplexMessage process ( ComplexMessage m ) throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { switch ( m . type ) { case FOO: case BAR: return m ; default : return null ; } } });

will only return a message whose type value is FOO or BAR , but not BAZ . If a message of type BAZ is found in the mailbox, it will remain there and be skipped, until it is selected by a subsequent call to receive (selective or plain).

Note: Selective receives always defer exit messages produced by watches to subsequent plain receive calls.

MessageProcessor.process can also process the message inline (rather than have it processed by the caller to receive ), and even call a nested receive :

protected List < Integer > doRun () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { final List < Integer > list = new ArrayList <>(); for ( int i = 0 ; i < 2 ; i ++) { receive ( new MessageProcessor < ComplexMessage , ComplexMessage >() { public ComplexMessage process ( ComplexMessage m ) throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { switch ( m . type ) { case FOO: list . add ( m . num ); receive ( new MessageProcessor < ComplexMessage , ComplexMessage >() { public ComplexMessage process ( ComplexMessage m ) throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { switch ( m . type ) { case BAZ: list . add ( m . num ); return m ; default : return null ; } } }); return m ; case BAR: list . add ( m . num ); return m ; default : return null ; } } }); } return list ; }

If a FOO is received first, then the next BAZ will be added to the list following the FOO , even if a BAR is found in the mailbox after the FOO , because the nested receive in the case FOO: clause selects only a BAZ message.

Note: MessageProcessor is much more compact in Java 8 when using lambda expressions.

Note: A simple, fluent API for selecting messages based on simple criteria is provided by the MessageSelector class (in the co.paralleluniverse.actors.behaviors ) package.

There are several actor systems that do not support selective receive, but Erlang does, and so does Quasar. The talk Death by Accidental Complexity, by Ulf Wiger, shows how using selective receive avoids implementing a full, complicated and error-prone transition matrix. In a different talk, Wiger compared non-selective (FIFO) receive to a tetris game where you must fit each piece into the puzzle as it comes, while selective receive turns the problem into a jigsaw puzzle, where you can look for a piece that you know will fit.

A word of caution: Using selective receive in your code may lead to deadlocks (because you’re essentially saying, I’m going to wait here until a specific message arrives). This can be easily avoided by always specifying a timeout (with the :after millis clause) when doing a selective receive. Selective receive is a powerful tool that can greatly help writing readable, maintainable message-handling code, but don’t over-use it.

Error Handling

The actor model does not only make concurrency easy; it also helps build fault-tolerant systems by compartmentalizing failure. Each actor is it’s own execution context - if it encounters an exception, only the actor is directly affected (like a thread, only actors are lightweight). Unlike regular functions/objects, where an exception has to be caught and handled immediately on the callstack, with actors we can completely separate code execution from error handling.

In fact, when using actors, it is often best to to follow the philosophy laid out by Joe Armstrong, Erlang’s chief designer, of “let it crash”. The idea is not to try and catch exceptions inside an actor, because attempting to catch and handle all exceptions is futile. Instead, we just let the actor crash, monitor its death elsewhere, and then take some action.

The principle of actor error handling is that an actor can be asked to be notified of another actor’s death and its cause. This is done through linking or watching.

Linking and Watching Actors

Linking two actors causes the death of one to throw an exception in the other. Two actors are linked with the link method of the Actor class, and can be unlinked with the unlink method. A link is symmetric: a.link(b) has the exact same effect of b.link(a) . The next section explains in detail how the linking mechanism works.

A more robust way of being notified of actor death than linking is with a watch (called monitor in Erlang; this is one of the few occasions we have abandoned the Erlang function names). To make an actor watch another you use the watch method. When a watched actor, its watcher actor (or many watching actors) receives an ExitMessage , explained in the next section. Unlike links, watches are asymmetric (if A watches B, B does not necessarily watch A), and they are also composable: the watch method returns a watch-id object that identifies the particular watch; every ExitMessage contains that watch-id object that uniquely identifies the watch that caused the message to be received. If an actor calls the watch method several times with the same argument (i.e. it watches the same actor more than once), a message will be received for each of these different watches. A watch can be undone with the unwatch method.

Lifecycle Messages and Lifecycle Exceptions

When actor B that is linked to or watched by actor A dies, it automatically sends an ExitMessage to A. The message is put in A’s mailbox and retrieved when A calls receive or tryReceive , but it isn’t actually returned by those methods.

When receive (or tryReceive ) is called, it takes the next message in the mailbox, and passes it to a protected method called filterMessage . Whatever filterMessage returns, that’s the message actually returned by receive (or tryReceive ), but it filterMessage returns null , receive will not return and wait for the next message (and tryReceive will check if another message is already available, or otherwise return null ). The default implementation of filterMessage always returns the message it received unless it is of type LifecycleMessage , in which case it passes it to the protected handleLifecycleMessage method.

handleLifecycleMessage examines the message. If it is about an actor that has died but has been unlinked or unwatched already, it just ignores the message. If it is an ExitMessage (which extends LifecycleMessage ), it checks to see if it’s been sent as a result of a watch (by testing whether its getWatch method returns a non-null value). If it is, it’s silently ignored. But if it’s a result of a linked actor dying ( getWatch() returns null ), the method throws a LifecycleException . This exception is thrown, in turn, by actor A’s call to receive (or tryReceive ). You can override handleLifecycleMessage to change this behavior.

If you do not want actor A to die if linked actor B does, you should surround the call to receive or tryReceive with a try {} catch(LifecycleException) {} block.

While you can override the filterMessage or the handleLifecycleMessage method, but will seldom have reason to override the latter, and almost never should override the former.

Registering Actors

Registering an actor gives it a public name that can be used to locate the actor. You register an actor with the register method of the Actor class, and unregister with the unregister method. To find an actor by its name, use the ActorRegistry.getActor static method.

If you’re running Quasar in a cluster configuration (see Clustering), registering an actor makes it globally available in the cluster. Calling ActorRegistry.getActor on any remote node would return a remote reference to the actor.

In addition, registering an actor automatically sets up monitoring for the actor, as explained in the next section.

Monitoring Actors

All actors running in a JVM instance are monitored by a MXBean registered with the name "co.paralleluniverse:type=Actors" . For details, please consult the Javadoc.

In addition, you can create a an MXBean that monitors a specific actor by calling the actor’s monitor method. That MBean will be registered as "co.paralleluniverse:type=quasar,monitor=actor,name=ACTOR_NAME" .This happens automatically when an actor is registered.

A monitored actor (either as a result of it being registered or of having called the monitor method) can have its MBean removed by calling the stopMonitor method.

Behaviors

Erlang’s designers have realized that many actors follow some common patterns - like an actor that receives requests for work and then sends back a result to the requester. They’ve turned those patterns into actor templates, called behaviors, in order to save people work and avoid some common errors. Erlang serves as the main inspiration to Quasar Actors, so some of these behaviors have been ported to Quasar.

Note: All behaviors use SLF4J loggers for logging.

RequestReplyHelper

A very common pattern that emerges when working with patterns is request-response, whereby a request message is sent to an actor, and a response is sent back to the sender of the request. While simple, some care must be taken to ensure that the response is matched with the correct request.

This behavior is implemented for you in the RequestReplyHelper class (in the co.paralleluniverse.actors.behaviors package).

To use it, the request message must extend co.paralleluniverse.actors.behaviors.RequestMessage . Suppose we have a IsDivisibleBy message class that extends RequestMessage . We can interact with a divisor-checking actor like so:

boolean result = RequestReplyHelper . call ( actor , new IsDivisibleBy ( 100 , 50 ));

And define the actor thus:

ActorRef < IsDivisibleBy > actor = new Actor < IsDivisibleBy , Void >( null , null ) { protected Void doRun () { for (;;) { IsDivisibleBy msg = receive (); try { boolean result = ( msg . getNumber () % msg . getDivisor () == 0 ); RequestReplyHelper . reply ( msg , result ); } catch ( ArithmeticException e ) { RequestReplyHelper . replyError ( msg , e ); } } } }. spawn ();

In the case of an ArithmeticException (if the divisor is 0), the exception will be thrown by RequestReplyHelper.call .

One of the nicest things about the RequestReplyHelper class, is that the code calling call does not have to be an actor. It can be called by a regular thread (or fiber). But if you examine the code of the reply method, you’ll see that it simply sends a response message to the request’s sender, which is an actor. This is achieved by the call method creating a temporary virtual actor, that will receive the reply message.

Behavior Actors

Similarly to Erlang, Quasar includes “actor templates” for some common actor behaviors, called behavior actors. Their functionality is separated in two: the implementation, which extends BehaviorActor and standardize handling of standard messages, and the interface, which extends Behavior (which, in turn, extends ActorRef ), and includes additional methods to those of ActorRef . It’s important to note that those interface methods do nothing more than assist in the creation and sending of said standard messages to the actor implementation. They employ no new construct.

By itself, BehaviorActor provides handling for ShutdownMessage , which, as its name suggests, requests an actor to shut itself down, along with the accompanying shutdown method in the Behavior class (the “interface” side). In addition, BehaviorActor defines standard initialization and termination methods which may be overriden. You should consult the Javadoc for more detail.

When a behavior actor is spawned, its spawn (or spawnThread ) method returns its “interface” (which is also an ActorRef ).

Note: Behavior actors usually have different constructors for convenience. Those that do not take an explicit MailboxConfig parameter, use the default configuration of an unbounded mailbox.

Server

The server behavior is an actor that implements a request-reply model. The behavior implementation is found in ServerActor , and the interface is Server .

You can implement a server actor by subclassing ServerActor and overriding the some or all of the methods:

init

terminate

handleCall

handleCast

handleInfo

handleTimeout

or by providing an instance of ServerHandler which implements these methods to the ServerActor constructor. Please consult the ServerActor JavaDoc for details.

The interface, Server , adds additional methods to ActorRef , such as call and cast , that allow sending synchronous (a request that waits for a response) or asynchronous (a request that does not wait for a response) requests to the server actor.

Note: call always defer exit messages produced by watches to subsequent plain receive calls.

Proxy Server

Because the server behavior implements a useful and common synchronous request-reply pattern, and because this pattern is natively supported by Java in the form of a method call, Quasar includes an implementation of a server actor that uses the method call syntax: ProxyServerActor . Instead of defining message classes manually, a proxy server has an ActorRef that directly implements one or more interfaces; calling their methods automatically generates messages that are sent to the server actor, which then responds to the requests by calling the respective method on a given target object. This way, a server request becomes a simple method call. Note that the actor semantics are preserved: the target object’s methods are all run on a single strand, so there is no need to account for concurrent calls.

Lets look at an example. Suppose we have this interface:

public static interface A { int foo ( String str , int x ) throws SuspendExecution ; void bar ( int x ) throws SuspendExecution ; }

We can then spawn the following actor:

Server a = new ProxyServerActor ( false , new A () { public int foo ( String str , int x ) { return str . length () + x ; } public void bar ( int x ) { System . out . println ( "x = " + x ); } }). spawn ();

To use the actor, we simply cast the ActorRef returned by spawn into our interface A . Every method invocation will be transformed into a message that, when received by the server actor, will be transformed back into a method call on the target:

(( A ) a ). foo ( "hello" , 5 ); // returns 10

Because the method calls are turned into messages that are processed by an actor on a separate strand, while the calling strand blocks until the result is returned, all of the interface’s methods must be suspendable. You can declare throws SuspendExecution on each method, annotate each method with @Suspendable , or annotate the entire interface, like so:

@Suspendable public static interface A { int foo ( String str , int x ); void bar ( int x ); }

This last option is particularly convenient if the methods’ implementation in the target is not suspendable.

For more details, please consult ProxyServerActor ’s Javadoc.

EventSource

The event-source behavior is an actor that can be notified of event messages, which are delivered to event handlers which may be registered with the actor.

To create an event source actor, simply construct an instance of the EventSourceActor class. Event handlers are instances of EventHandler . Event handlers can be registered or unregistered with the actor, and events sent to the actor, through the behavior’s interface, the EventSource class.

Event handlers are called synchronously on the same strand as the actor’s and should not block the strand.

FiniteStateMachineActor

The finite-state-machine behavior is an actor that switches among a set of states and behaves differently in each.

To create a finite state machine actor, simply construct an instance of the FiniteStateMachineActor class. Each of the actor’s states is represented by a SuspendableCallable implementation returning the next state, or the special FiniteStateMachineActor.TERMINATE state to terminate the actor. You need to override the initialState method so that it returns the actor’s initial state. This class is best enjoyed using Java 8 lambda syntax, as in the following example:

new FiniteStateMachineActor () { @Override protected SuspendableCallable < SuspendableCallable > initialState () { return this :: state1 ; } private SuspendableCallable < SuspendableCallable > state1 () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { return receive (( m ) -> { if ( "a" . equals ( m )) return this :: state2 ; return null ; // don't handle message }); } private SuspendableCallable < SuspendableCallable > state2 () throws SuspendExecution , InterruptedException { return receive (( m ) -> { if ( "b" . equals ( m )) { System . out . println ( "Done!" ); return TERMINATE ; } return null ; // don't handle message }); } }. spawn ();

Supervisors

The last behavior actor, the supervisor deserves a chapter of its own, as it’s at the core of the actor model’s error handling philosophy.

Actors provide fault isolation. When an exception occurs in an actor it can only (directly) take down that actor. Actors also provide fault detection and identification. As we’ve seen, other actors can be notified of an actor’s death, as well as its cause, via watches and links.

Like other behaviors, the supervisor is a behavior that codifies and standardizes good actor practices; in this case: fault handling. As its name implies, a supervisor is an actor that supervises one or more other actors and watches them to detect their death. When a supervised (or child) actor dies, the supervisor can take several pre-configured actions such as restarting the dead actor or killing and restarting all children. The supervisor might also choose to kill itself and escalate the problem, possibly to its own supervisor.

Actors performing business logic, “worker actors”, are supervised by a supervisor actor that detects when they die and takes one of several pre-configured actions. Supervisors may, in turn, be supervised by other supervisors, thus forming a supervision hierarchy that compartmentalizes failure and recovery.

The basic philosophy behind supervisor-based fault handling was named “let it crash” by Erlang’s designer, Joe Armstrong. The idea is that instead of trying to fix the program state after every expected exception, we simply let an actor crash when it encounters an unexpected condition and “reboot” it.

A supervisors works as follows: it has a number of children, worker actors or other supervisors that are registered to be supervised wither at the supervisor’s construction time or at a later time. Each child has a mode (represented by the Supervisor.ChildMode class): PERMANENT , TRANSIENT or TEMPORARY that determines whether its death will trigger the supervisor’s recovery event. When the recovery event is triggered, the supervisor takes action specified by its restart strategy - represented by the SupervisorActor.RestartStrategy class - or it will give up and fail, depending on predefined failure modes.

When a child actor in the PERMANENT mode dies, it will always trigger its supervisor’s recovery event. When a child in the TRANSIENT mode dies, it will trigger a recovery event only if it has died as a result of an exception, but not if it has simply finished its operation. A TEMPORARY child never triggers it supervisor’s recovery event.

A supervisor’s restart strategy determines what it does during a recovery event: A strategy of ESCALATE means that the supervisor will shut down (“kill”) all its surviving children and then die; a ONE_FOR_ONE strategy will restart the dead child; an ALL_FOR_ONE strategy will shut down all children and then restart them all; a REST_FOR_ONE strategy will shut down and restart all those children added to the supervisor after the dead child.

Children can be added to the supervisor actor either at construction time or later, with Supervisor ’s addChild method. A child is added by passing a ChildSpec to the supervisor. The ChildSpec contains the means of how to start the actor, usually in the form of an ActorSpec (see the next section), or as an already constructed actor; the childs mode; and how many times an actor is allowed to be restarted in a given amount of time. If the actor is restarted too many times within the specified duration, the supervisor gives up and terminates (along with all its children) causing an escalation.

If an actor needs to know the identity of its siblings, it should add them to the supervisor manually (with Supervisor ’s addChild method). For that, it needs to know the identity of its supervisor. To do that, you can construct the ActorSpec in the SupervisorActor ’s Initializer or in SupervisorActor.init() method (subclass SupervisorActor ), pass Actor.self() to the actor’s constructor, and add it to the supervisor with addChild . Alternatively, simply call Actor.self() in the child’s constructor. This works because the children are constructed from specs (provided they have not been constructed by the caller) during the supervisor’s run, so calling Actor.self() anywhere in the construction process would return the supervisor.

Actor Restarts

Restarting an actor means construction a new actor and spawning it. That is why the supervisor’s ChildSpec takes an instance of ActorBuilder . Usually, you’ll use ActorSpec as the builder instance. Sometimes, however, you’d like to add a running actor to the supervisor, and that is why ChildSpec has a constructor that takes an ActorRef . To restart such actors, the supervisor relies on the fact that ActorRef s to local actors implement ActorBuilder . When requested to build a new actor, they call the old actor’s reinstantiate method to create a clone of the old actor.

When an actor is restarted, the supervisor takes care to run it on the same type of strand (thread or fiber) as the old actor.

Hot Code Swapping

Hot code swapping is the ability to change your program’s code while it is running, with no need for a restart. Quasar actors support a limited and controlled, yet very useful, form of hot code swapping for actor code. Both plain actor implementations as well as behaviors can be loaded and swapped in at runtime.

Creating and Loading Code Modules

To create an upgraded version of an actor class or several of them, package the upgraded classes, along with any other accompanying classes into a jar file. When the jar is loaded, as we’ll see below, those classes that are marked as upgrades will replace their current versions. Only classes representing actor implementation (or actor behavior implementation) can be upgraded directly. Other classes might be upgraded as well if they store actor state as we’ll see in the next section. Actor (and behavior) upgrades must be explicitly or implicitly specified. To explicitly specify an upgrade, annotate the class with the @Upgrade annotation, or include its fully qualified name in a space-separated list as the value of the "Upgrade-Classes" attribute in the jar’s manifest. Alternatively, if the "Upgrade-Classes" attribute has the value * , all classes in the jar extending an actor or behavior class (or implementing a behavior interface like ServerHandler ) will be automatically upgraded.

Once the jar is created, there are two ways to load it into the program. The first involves calling the reloadModule operation of the "co.paralleluniverse:type=ActorLoader" MBean, passing a URL for the jar; this can be done via any JMX console, such as VisualVM. The unloadModule operation can be used to unload the jar and revert actors to their previous implementation.

The second way is by designating a special module directory by setting the "co.paralleluniverse.actors.moduleDir" system property (this must be done when originally running the program). Then, any jar file copied into that directory will be automatically detected and loaded (this may take up to 10 seconds on some operating systems). A loaded jar that is removed from the module directory will be automatically unloaded.

Note: You might want to enable the "co.paralleluniverse.actors.ActorLoader" logger to view logs pertaining to hot code swapping.

State Upgrade

When an actor is upgraded (which might require an explicit call, as we’ll see in the next section), a new instance of the class’s new version will be created, and all of the actor’s state will be transferred to the new instance.

Actor state can be stored directly in primitive fields of the actor class, or in object fields that may, in turn, contain primitives or yet other objects. When an upgraded actor class is loaded, a new instance is created for each upgraded actor, and the old actor state is copied to it. Fields of the same name and type are copied as is. Reference (object) fields whose classes have upgraded versions in the loaded jar will be recursively replicated in the same way (fields will be copied by name). Whenever a new instance is created, any method marked with the @OnUpgrade annotation will be called. This will happen both for the actor class, as well as for any class holding actor state (i.e. found somewhere in the object graph starting at the actor) that undergoes an upgrade. An upgraded class can have more or fewer fields than its previous versions. Dropped fields will simply not be copied to the new version; newly added fields can be initialized in @OnUpgrade methods.

Swapping Plain Actors

Plain actor code is not swapped automatically – an actor must explicitly support swapping; therefore plain actors must be originally built with a possible upgrade in mind. As an actor runs, when it reaches a point where swapping in a new version makes sense (depending on your application logic, but often right before receiving a new message), it must call the checkCodeSwap method of the Actor class. If a new version of the actor class has been loaded, its doRun method will begin anew, after actor state has been copied. For that reason, initialization code found at the beginning of doRun must take into account the fact that it may be run when some or all actor state already initialized.

Swapping Behaviors

Unlike plain actors, behaviors can be swapped in without any early consideration (i.e. behaviors already call checkCodeSwap at appropriate points). Internal state will be copied, just as with plain actors.

Example

A complete hot code swapping example can be found in this GitHub repository.

Quasar-Kotlin Actors

Kotlin’s inline higher-order functions and the when construct enable a powerful and natural selective receive syntax:

receive ( 1000 , TimeUnit . MILLISECONDS ) { // Fiber-blocking when ( it ) { is Msg -> { if ( it . txt == "ping" ) it . from . send ( "pong" ) // Fiber-blocking } "finished" -> { println ( "Pong received 'finished', exiting" ) return // Non-local return, exit actor } is Companion . Timeout -> { println ( "Pong timeout in 'receive', exiting" ) return // Non-local return, exit actor } else -> defer () } }

This example highlights a few interesting capabilities:

Straightforward message picking as well as acting upon (even with further communication, if needed).

Deferring a message when it’s not yet possible (or handy) to extract it from the mailbox for use.

Non-local returns, for example to terminate the actor’s processing loop.

Handling of timeouts in the message-processing closure.

Records

Just as actors expose their operations through a simple, standard interface that allows (pretty-much) only to send it messages, so should state be exposed through a simple, standard, interface. A record, then, is such a data-access interface akin to a map. It basically has get(field) and set(field, value) methods, only it preserves the type information of its field to provide type safety.

Records provide similar functionality to plain Java objects with public fields, but, unlike plain objects, they allow us to inject cross-cutting concerns on field-get and field-set operations, like restricting access to specific strands, or making sure that state is mutated (or read) only inside transactions.

Just as objects are instances of a classes, so too are records instances of a record type, represented by the RecordType class. A new record type must be declared as a static member of a class. The class must only include the definition of a single record type, and this class is called the type’s identifier class, because it is used only to uniquely identify the record type (only its name is used internally).

Here’s an example record type definition:

class A { public static final RecordType < A > aType = RecordType . newType ( A . class ); public static final IntField < A > $id = aType . intField ( "id" ); public static final DoubleField < A > $foo = aType . doubleField ( "id" , Field . TRANSIENT ); public static final ObjectField < A , String > $name = aType . objectField ( "name" , String . class ); public static final ObjectField < A , List < String >> $emails = aType . objectField ( "emails" , new TypeToken < List < String >() {}); }

A is the type’s identifier class. The fields are instances of Field and are, by convention, given identifiers that begin with a $ to make it clear that they identify fields rather than values.

Record types, like classes, can extend a parent record type by providing the super-type to RecordType.newType or to RecordType ’s constructor.

A new record is instantiated by calling one of RecordType ’s newInstance methods. Please consult the Javadoc for details.

So, instead of writing obj.getX() , or obj.x we write obj.get($x) . What does this get us other than re-inventing what is a basic Java functionality, minus the some type safety? Like actors, records give up some type safety (we preserve the type of the x field, but the compiler can’t tell us whether obj even has an x field; similarly, if we send message m to actor a , the compiler can’t know whether a supports an m operation), they do so at well-defined interface points between separate software components. What we gain is loose coupling. For example, among other things, we gain the ability to swap the implementation of the record or actor at runtime for maintenance (hot code-swapping).

We gain other things by limiting component interaction to the narrow interfaces of actors and records, and that is the ability to insert cross-cutting concerns. For example, what happens if a method that consumes a resource is called too often? We need to explicitly insert load-handling code into the method. But if we communicate with the component through an actor interface, we can implement a general policy of handling too many messages that are thrown at any actor. Similarly with records. Parallel Universe’s database, SpaceBase, uses records to restrict read and writes of shared state to well-defined transactions. Attempts to read or write state outside a transaction will throw a runtime exception.

Because records are intended to control mutability, an ObjectField should never reference a mutable object. RecordType will perform a very simple test on an ObjectField type and output a warning to the console if the class appears mutable. Conclusively determining whether a class is mutable or not is extremely difficult, so the test is a very simple one: it will warn if the class has public non-static, non-final fields, or if it has public methods whose name begins with “set”.

Clustering

Quasar is able to run on a cluster, thereby letting actors and channels communicate across machines. The Quasar cluster runs on top of Galaxy, Parallel Universe’s in-memory data grid.

In this version, clustering is pretty rudimentary, but essential features should work: actors can be made discoverable on the network, messages can be passed among actors on different nodes, and an actor on a failing node will behave as expected of a dying actor with respect to exit messages sent to other, remote, watching it or linked to it.

Enabling Clustering

First, you will need to add the co.paralleluniverse:quasar-galaxy artifact as a dependency to your project, and set some Galaxy cluster properties. At the very least you will need to set "galaxy.nodeId" , which will have to be a different short value for each master node. If you’re running several nodes on the same machine, you will also need to set "galaxy.port" and "galaxy.slave_port" . These properties can be set in several ways. The simplest is to define them as JVM system properties (as -D command line arguments).However, you can also set them in the Galaxy configuration XML files or in a properties file. Please refer to the Galaxy documentation for more detail.

Then, to make an actor discoverable cluster-wide, all you need to do is register it with the register method of the Actor class.

That’s it. The actor is now known throughout the cluster, and can be accessed by calling ActorRegistry.getActor on any node.

An actor doesn’t have to be registered in order to be reachable on the network. Registering it simply makes it discoverable. If we pass an ActorRef of local actor in a message to a remote actor, the remote actor will be able to send messages to the local actor as well.

Cluster Configuration

For instructions on how to configure the Galaxy cluster, please refer to Galaxy’s getting started guide.

Actor Migration

Running actors can migrate from one cluster node to another, while preserving their state. Migration happens in two steps. First an actor migrates, which suspends it and makes its internal state available to the cluster, and then it is hired by another cluster node an resumed.

Actors that support migration, must implement the (empty) marker interface MigratingActor . Then, in order to migrate, an actor must call one of two methods: migrateAndRestart or migrate . migrateAndRestart suspends the actor in such a way that when it is later hired, it will be restarted (i.e., its doRun method will be called again and run from the top), but the current value of the actor’s fields will be preserved, while migrate suspends the fiber the actor is running in (and is therefore available only for actors running in fibers), so that when the actor is hired, it will continue execution from the point the migrate method was called. The hire method hires and resumes the actor.

Quasar and Reactive Streams

Reactive Streams are a new JVM non-JCP standard for an API that facilitates interoperation among various libraries for asynchronous IO streams, including RxJava, Akka Streams, Pivotal Reactor and Quasar. The standard allows code using any of the compliant libraries to interoperate with code written using any of the other.

Quasar’s quasar-reactive-streams artifact contains a full, TCK-compliant implementation of Reactive Streams, which converts streams to Quasar channels and vice versa. The implementation contains a single public class, co.paralleluniverse.strands.channels.reactivestreams.ReactiveStreams , with a set of static methods that perform the conversion. The ReactiveStreams class Javadoc) has all the details.

Examples

For examples of using Quasar, you can take a look at Quasar’s test suite.

Distributed Examples

There are a few examples of distributed actors in the example package. You can run them after cloning the repository.

In order to run the ping pong example, start the Pong actor by:

gradle :quasar-galaxy:run -PmainClass = co.paralleluniverse.galaxy.example.pingpong.Pong

Start the Ping actor in a different terminal by:

gradle :quasar-galaxy:run -PmainClass=co.paralleluniverse.galaxy.example.pingpong.Ping

To run the actors on different computers, change the following lines in the build.gradle file to the appropriate network configuration: