NOTE: Actress gem was merged into concurrent-ruby. It's no longer maintained.

Actress

Actor model library.

Provides Future and Actors. Actors are sharing Thread pool so as many actors as needed can be spawned allowing to better structure your code without caring about number of threads or recycling of actors. Architecture inspired by Erlang and Akka. (AFAIK This is not possible with any other gem providing Actor model.)

Quick peak

require 'actress'

Message = Algebrick.type do
  variants Plus     = type { fields a: Numeric, b: Numeric },
           Subtract = type { fields a: Numeric, b: Numeric }
end

class Counter < Actress::Abstract

  def on_message(message)
    Type! message, Message
    match message,
          (on ~Plus do |(a, b)|
            a + b
          end),
          (on Subtract.(~any, ~any) do |a, b|
            a - b
          end)
  end
end

world   = Actress::World.new
counter = world.spawn Counter, 'counter'

operations = [Plus[1, 2],
              Subtract[2, 1]]
results    = operations.map { |o| counter.ask o } # futures
p results.map(&:value) # => [3,1]

world.terminate

Note

This is still only version 0.0.x please keep that in mind when something breaks ;)

actress

Development

Runtime

Actress

Quick peak

Note