Libprocess Developer Guide

Note This Developer Guide is Work in Progress.

The library libprocess provides high level elements for an actor programming style with asynchronous message-handling and a variety of related basic system primitives. Its API and implementation are written in C++.

Introduction

The design of libprocess is inspired by Erlang, a language that implements the actor model.

As the name already suggests, one of the libprocess core concepts is a Process. This is a single threaded, independent actor which communicates with other processes, locally and remotely, by sending and receiving HTTP requests and responses.

At a higher level, functional composition of processes is facilitated using futures and promises.

Overview

Table of Contents

• Processes and the Asynchronous Pimpl Pattern
• Futures and Promises
• HTTP
• Testing
• Miscellaneous Primitives

---

Processes and the Asynchronous Pimpl Pattern

A process is an actor, effectively a cross between a thread and an object.

Creating/spawning a process is very cheap (no actual thread gets created, and no thread stack gets allocated).

Each process has a queue of incoming events that it processes one at a time.

Processes provide execution contexts (only one thread executing within a process at a time so no need for per process synchronization).

delay

delay instead of dispatching for execution right away, it allows it to be scheduled after a certain time duration.

dispatch

dispatch schedules a method for asynchronous execution.

ID

Generates a unique identifier string given a prefix. This is used to provide PID names.

PID

A PID provides a level of indirection for naming a process without having an actual reference (pointer) to it (necessary for remote processes).

---

Futures and Promises

The Future and Promise primitives are used to enable programmers to write asynchronous, non-blocking, and highly concurrent software.

A Future acts as the read-side of a result which might be computed asynchronously. A Promise, on the other hand, acts as the write-side "container". We'll use some examples to explain the concepts.

First, you can construct a Promise of a particular type by doing the following:

using namespace process;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  Promise<int> promise;

  return 0;
}

A Promise is not copyable or assignable, in order to encourage strict ownership rules between processes (i.e., it's hard to reason about multiple actors concurrently trying to complete a Promise, even if it's safe to do so concurrently).

You can get a Future from a Promise using the Promise::future() method:

using namespace process;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  Promise<int> promise;

  Future<int> future = promise.future();

  return 0;
}

Note that the templated type of the future must be the exact same as the promise, you can not create a covariant or contravariant future. Unlike Promise, a Future can be both copied and assigned:

using namespace process;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  Promise<int> promise;

  Future<int> future = promise.future();

  // You can copy a future.
  Future<int> future2 = future;

  // You can also assign a future (NOTE: this future will never
  // complete because the Promise goes out of scope, but the
  // Future is still valid and can be used normally.)
  future = Promise<int>().future();

  return 0;
}

The result encapsulated in the Future/Promise can be in one of four states: PENDING, READY, FAILED, DISCARDED. When a Promise is first created the result is PENDING. When you complete a Promise using the Promise::set() method the result becomes READY:

using namespace process;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  Promise<int> promise;

  Future<int> future = promise.future();

  promise.set(42);

  CHECK(future.isReady());

  return 0;
}

NOTE: CHECK is a macro from gtest which acts like an assert but prints a stack trace and does better signal management. In addition to CHECK, we've also created wrapper macros CHECK_PENDING, CHECK_READY, CHECK_FAILED, CHECK_DISCARDED which enables you to more concisely do things like CHECK_READY(future) in your code. We'll use those throughout the rest of this guide.

TODO(benh):

• Using Future and Promise between actors, i.e., dispatch returning a Future
• Promise::fail()
• Promise::discard() and Future::discard()
• Future::onReady(), Future::onFailed(), Future::onDiscarded()
• Future::then(), Future::repair(), Future::after
• defer
• Future::await()

---

HTTP

route

route installs an http endpoint onto a process.

---

Testing

---

Miscellaneous Primitives

async

Async defines a function template for asynchronously executing function closures. It provides their results as futures.