akkadotnet/akka.net

Port of Akka actors for .NET

Raymen Scholten

@raymens

let actorOfCtor (state : 'a) (fn : 'a -> 'Message -> unit) (mailbox : Actor<'Message>) : Cont<'Message, 'Returned> =

let rec loop() =  
    actor {  
        let! msg = mailbox.Receive() 
        fn state msg 
        return! loop() 
    } 
loop()

allows the creation of an actor that will have some sort of initial data that is usable by the messageHandler every message

Bartosz Sypytkowski

@Horusiath

@raymens if you must use some state in F# API, pass it as a rec loop parameter , eg:

type MyState = { X: int; Y: int }
let aref = spawn system "my-actor" <| fun mailbox ->
    let rec loop state = actor {
         let! msg = mailbox.Receive()
         return! loop ({ state with Y = msg })
    }
    loop ({X = 1; Y = 2})

this way it maintain F# principles - immutable data, function as unit of composition etc.

Raymen Scholten

@raymens

thanks, that's better :)

Håkan Canberger

@HCanber

@raymens If you don't name an actor, the system will assign it a unique name. If you want the name to follow some kind of pattern, like in your example, you have to write it yourself.

Bartosz Sypytkowski

@Horusiath

@Aaronontheweb do you have some kind of the documentation or tech. overview to Helios? I'd like to see, what else purposes could it serve.

Raymen Scholten

@raymens

@HCanber allright, thank you

Raymen Scholten

@raymens

Are questions better suited for StackOverflow or gitter?

Roger Johansson

@rogeralsing

Id say gitter, most of us are here every day

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

@Horusiath very little, although I'm in the process of migrating it to its own organization and publishing docs around Helios 2.0

the only real docs I have for at it at the moment are its specs and samples

@stefansedich submitted a PR a couple of days ago which should enable Mono support in Helios

and should fix the Akka Remoting issues

turns out that TcpClient and UdpClient call Socket.Bind in their constructors on Mono, which makes it impossible to set socket options on them

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

@smalldave you might appreciate this, btw https://github.com/petabridge/lighthouse - took an old project I started on with Akka.Cluster a while back and I'm modernizing it now

basically it's a windows service that acts as a dedicated seed node for clusters that want to use roles

runs virtually no code other than what's in Akka.Cluster so it doesn't need to be updated

designed for PaaS environments like Elastic Beanstalk, AppHarbor, Azure Websites

I'm in the process of rewriting it to use Topshelf now

and an NLog adapter that lets it write to the windows event log

Topshelf itself is super neat - never used it until I saw some of our contributors mention it: http://topshelf-project.com/

David Smith

@smalldave

+1 for Topshelf. Been using it for years. Microsoft should have adopted by now

lighthouse looks interesting

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

yeah, this is way better than the alternatives

can't believe I hadn't used it until now

the idea behind lighthouse is basically to have a 1-2 lighthouse instances sitting on dedicated IaaS boxes

it's meant to be a scriptable, configurable Akka.Cluster service that you will eventually just be able to deploy via a packaged binary

and some .config modifications

the idea is to just keep a couple of these around as a lightweight, do-it-yourself Akka.Cluster service discovery endpoint

they're not necessary in environments where you can use something like the EC2 SDK to query all of the IPs of other machines in your deployment group

David Smith

@smalldave

think it's a good idea and good name!

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

awesome, glad you like it :)

the code's super simple - mostly just some configuration injection stuff

David Smith

@smalldave

was @Horusiath talking about being able to deploy actors along with their code remotely in F#? makes a no frills cluster node interesting

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

yes he was

I think there's a way that can be done generically too

David Smith

@smalldave

not sure how I feel about that. bit scary :)

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

I was drafting a proof of concept idea for a talk @skotzko and I are giving later this month on doing Streaming ETL with Akka.NET

had the notion of allowing end users to install a NuGet package and write a .NET assembly that implements a few interfaces for doing Extract / Transform

and distributing that across the cluster - having specific actors deployed who use that code internerally since it knows how to construct objects with that interface

realized that you could just bake that code into the actor definitions themselves

the part that would suck is how you deal with updating an assembly you've already deployed once

I guess you'd need to have a registry on each node that its able to perform a CAS operation to do an in-place update

and some sort of coordinator responsible for making sure that all nodes eventually end up using the same binary

but then how do you kill off all of the actors deployed using the old stuff?

David Smith

@smalldave

you are making the f# approach sound less scary :)

Aaron Stannard

@Aaronontheweb

HAHA

yeah, I think maybe it's something that's a lot easier to do in F# :smile:

but that is the nasty edge case though

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