The Obligatory Hello World

This example shows how to define and consume actors.

Hello World

Define a message

The first thing we do, is to define a message. A message is an object that represents some form of information the actor can act upon. There are two flavors of messages, plain object/struct messages, or Protobuf messages. Read more on Protobuf messages here: …

// define a POCO message
record Hello(string Who);

// define a struct for our message
type Hello struct{ Who string }

Define your actor

Now let’s define the actor, from a technical point of view, you can think of an actor as an asynchronous worker.

The actor is a type, that follows a specific interface, the actor interface. This interface receives a Context, this context contains information about the actor internals. In this case, we are interested in acting upon the message the actor received.

//the actor type, owner of any actor related state
class HelloActor : IActor
{
    //the receive function, invoked by the runtime whenever a message
    //should be processed
    public Task ReceiveAsync(IContext context)
    {
        //the message we received
        var msg = context.Message; 
        //match message based on type
        if (msg is Hello helloMsg)
        {
            Console.WriteLine($"Hello {helloMsg.Who}");
        }
        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }
}

//the actor type, owner of any actor related state
type helloActor struct{}

//the receive function, invoked by the runtime whenever a message
//should be processed
func (state *HelloActor) Receive(context actor.Context) {
    //the message we received
    switch msg := context.Message().(type) {
    //match message based on type
    case Hello:
        fmt.Printf("Hello %v\n", msg.Who)
    }
}

Usage

Once we have both the message and actor, we can now hook everything up and send our first message to an actor.

var system = new ActorSystem();

//the actor configuration
var props = Props.FromProducer(() => new HelloActor());

//instantiate the actor
var pid = system.Root.Spawn(props);

//send a message to the actor
system.Root.Send(pid, new Hello("Alex"));

//prevent application from shutting down before message is received
Console.ReadLine();

//the actor configuration
props := actor.FromInstance(&HelloActor{})

//instantiate the actor
pid := actor.Spawn(props)

//send a message to the actor
pid.Send(Hello{Who: "Roger"})

The Obligatory Hello World

Hello World

Define a message

Define your actor

Usage

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