A Glimpse at the Future of CAF

Sometimes, a design outlives its usefulness. CAF started with its first commit on March 4, 2011. Its mission statement? Provide a lightweight, domain-specifc language (DSL) for actors in C++. The user-facing API should be as minimalistic as possible by hiding internal state of the actor runtime. Key components, such as scheduler or middleman, run as lazily initialized singletons. This design works great as long as applications do not wish to configure parameters of these global components. With a growing user base and more fields of applications, it becomes clear that hiding as much state of the system as possible puts obstacles in the way of many users.

After much consideration, we decided to start over with a API in 0.15. The next release of CAF embodies our vision for a 1.0 release, and addresses the vibrant feedback we received over the years. The new anchor of CAF applications is actor_system , which replaces the previous singleton-based design. An actor system encapsulates runtime state, which CAF previously maintained globally, such as announced type information and scheduler behavior. Users can now fully control the initialization phase of an actor system. Aside from improved configurability, this change has the advantage that multiple actor systems can now co-exist in the same process, e.g., one with a scheduler tuned for high-throughput and one with a scheduler optimized for low latency scenarios.

With CAF 0.15, we replaced misleading function names with more intuitive ones (e.g., sync_send with request ). We also improved the reference counting implementation used for actor garbage collection. Without further ado, this is how the Hello World example will look in 0.15:

behavior mirror ( event_based_actor * self ) { // return the (initial) actor behavior return { // a handler for messages containing a single string // that replies with a string [ = ]( const string & what ) -> string { // prints "Hello World!" via aout (thread-safe cout wrapper) aout ( self ) << what << endl ; // reply "!dlroW olleH" return string ( what . rbegin (), what . rend ()); } }; } void hello_world ( event_based_actor * self , const actor & buddy ) { // send "Hello World!" to our buddy ... self -> request ( buddy , std :: chrono :: seconds ( 10 ), "Hello World!" ). then ( // ... wait up to 10s for a response ... [ = ]( const string & what ) { // ... and print it aout ( self ) << what << endl ; } ); } int main () { // our CAF environment actor_system system ; // create a new actor that calls 'mirror()' auto mirror_actor = system . spawn ( mirror ); // create another actor that calls 'hello_world(mirror_actor)'; system . spawn ( hello_world , mirror_actor ); // system will wait until both actors are destroyed before leaving main }

For comparison, this is the same code in 0.14:

behavior mirror ( event_based_actor * self ) { // return the (initial) actor behavior return { // a handler for messages containing a single string // that replies with a string [ = ]( const string & what ) -> string { // prints "Hello World!" via aout (thread-safe cout wrapper) aout ( self ) << what << endl ; // terminates this actor ('become' otherwise loops forever) self -> quit (); // reply "!dlroW olleH" return string ( what . rbegin (), what . rend ()); } }; } void hello_world ( event_based_actor * self , const actor & buddy ) { // send "Hello World!" to our buddy ... self -> sync_send ( buddy , "Hello World!" ). then ( // ... wait for a response ... [ = ]( const string & what ) { // ... and print it aout ( self ) << what << endl ; } ); } int main () { // create a new actor that calls 'mirror()' auto mirror_actor = spawn ( mirror ); // create another actor that calls 'hello_world(mirror_actor)'; spawn ( hello_world , mirror_actor ); // wait until all other actors we have spawned are done await_all_actors_done (); // run cleanup code before exiting main shutdown (); }

Most notably, we no longer need to call await_all_actors_done() and shutdown() in main() . Nor does the mirror actor need to call quit() explicitly. Once system goes out of scope, it will wait (i.e., block) for all remaining actors before cleaning up. The mirror actor is destroyed implicitly once there is no more reference to it. Finally, sync_send has been renamed to request and now requires a timeout.

Additionally, dynamically and statically typed actors now exhibit a symmetric API. We also provide new ways to compose actors and the behavior of actors. If you are interested in the current state of development, check out the topic/actor-system branch. It is in development since November 2015, currently contains 200 commits, and will get merged into develop soon.

Since version 0.15 has many API changes, we will release at least one pre-release version for collecting user feedback and finalizing the API. The first pre-release is scheduled for June and will include a complete overhaul of the user manual. It was not an easy decision to break the API on so many layers. However, the changes are the result of all the feedback we received over years as well as our own experiences with using CAF on a daily basis. This makes version 0.15 the most important milestone towards a stable 1.0 release.