Actors - fauxtp

Actors are the fundamental unit of concurrency in fauxtp. Each actor is a lightweight process (implemented as an AnyIO task) with its own private state and a mailbox for receiving messages.

Core Concepts¶

Isolation: Actors do not share state. They communicate exclusively through message passing.
Mailbox: Every actor has a mailbox that buffers incoming messages.
PID: A Process Identifier used to address and send messages to an actor.

Creating an Actor¶

To create an actor, inherit from fauxtp.actor.base.Actor and implement the loop method.

from fauxtp.actor.base import Actor
import anyio

class MyActor(Actor):
    async def loop(self):
        while True:
            # Wait for a message
            msg = await self.receive()
            print(f"Received: {msg}")

async def main():
    async with anyio.create_task_group() as tg:
        pid = await MyActor.start(task_group=tg)
        await pid.send("Hello!")

anyio.run(main)

Pattern Matching¶

fauxtp encourages the use of Python’s match statement for handling messages, similar to Erlang’s receive.

async def loop(self):
    while True:
        match await self.receive():
            case ("ping", sender_pid):
                await sender_pid.send("pong")
            case "stop":
                break

Lifecycle¶

Actors are started within an AnyIO TaskGroup. When the TaskGroup exits, all actors started within it are cancelled. You can also stop an actor by returning from its loop method or by calling pid.stop().