silly-actors

A small library to create and communicate actors on C.

Create actors

To create an actor first write a function describing how the actor should act on messages:

void actor_handler(Actor *self, void *message) {
	int data = *(int*)message;
	printf("Actor received = %i \n", data);
}

and create the actor passing the handler function and a pointer to it's state:

ActorState *actor_state = ... ;
Actor *actor = actor_create(actor_handler, actor_state);

Send a message to an actor

To send a message to an actor you must pass three parameters: the receiver actor pointer (Actor*), a pointer to the message, and the size of the message. For example:

int message = 42;
actor_send(actor, &message, sizeof(int));

On remote nodes

If you want to send and receive messages through a network you can do something like this:

On the node you want to expose the actor at you can call the function remote_actor_listen which receives a pointer to the actor and a port number:

Actor *actor = actor_create(actor_callback, actor_state);
if(!remote_actor_listen(actor, 6666)) {
  fprintf(stderr, "NOOOOOO!");
  exit(1);
}
printf("Actor listening!\n");

And on the sending side you first call the function remote_actor_create_ref with the hostname and the port where you exposed the actor and then you can callremote_actor_send passing the remote reference to the actor, the message and it's size:

char *hostname = "localhost";
int port = 6666;
RemoteActorRef *remote_actor_ref = remote_actor_create_ref(hostname, port);
int *message = malloc(sizeof(int));
*message = 123;
if(!remote_actor_send(remote_actor_ref, message, sizeof(int))) {
  fprintf(stderr, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO");
  exit(1);
}
printf("SENDED!\n");

@TODO

• Make it more efficient w.r.t the use of threads.
• Maybe a non-blocking queue implementation.