Introduction - Actor framework featuring actors and agents

Sento is a 'message passing' library/framework with actors similar to Erlang or Akka. It supports creating systems that should work reactive, require parallel computing and event based message handling.

Sento features:

• Actors with ask (?) and tell (!) operations. ask can be asynchronous or synchronous.
• Agents: Agents are a specialization of Actors for wrapping state with a standardized interface of init, get and set. There are also specialized Agents for Common Lisps array and hash-map data structures.
• Router: Router offers a similar interface as Actor with ask and tell but collects multiple Actors for load-balancing.
• EventStream: all Actors and Agents are connected to an EventStream and can subscribe to messages or publish messages. This is similar to an event-bus.
• Tasks: a simple API for concurrency.

Changes from Sento 2

No new features actually. But many cleanups, obstacles removed, and hopefully a more consistent way of doing things. There are many API changes so it varants a major version update. One of the big obstacles, the cons return was removed. This was still a relict from early versions where things were more leaned on the Erlang GenServer way of doing things. But Common Lisp is not Erlang VM. The changes should allow adding more features in the future, like remoting support. But this is not easy, in partucular to make it secure.

Intro

(Please also checkout the API documentation for further information) (for migrations from Sento v2, please check below migration guide)

Creating an actor-system

The first thing you wanna do is to create an actor system. In simple terms, an actor system is a container where all actors live in. So at any time the actor system knows which actors exist.

To create an actor system we can first change package to :sento-user because it imports the majority of necessary namespaces fopr convenience. Then, do:

(defvar *system* (make-actor-system))

When we look at *system* in the repl we see some information of the actor system:

#<ACTOR-SYSTEM config: (DISPATCHERS
                        (SHARED (WORKERS 4 STRATEGY RANDOM))
                        TIMEOUT-TIMER
                        (RESOLUTION 500 MAX-SIZE 1000)
                        EVENTSTREAM
                       (DISPATCHER-ID
                         SHARED)), user actors: 0, internal actors: 5>

The actor-system has, by default, four shared message dispatcher workers. Depending on how busy the system tends to be this default can be increased. Those four workers are part of the 'internal actors'. The 5th actor drives the event-stream (later more on that, but in a nutshell it's something like an event bus).

There are none 'user actors' yet, and the 'config' is the default config specifying the number of message dispatch workers (4) and the strategy they use to balance throughput, 'random' here.

Using a custom config is it possible to change much of those defaults. For instance, create custom dispatchers, i.e. a dedicated dispatcher used for the 'Tasks' api (see later for more info). The event-stream by default uses the global 'shared' dispatcher. Changing the config it would be possible to have the event-stream actor use a :pinned dispatcher (more on dispatchers later) to optimize throughput. Etc.

Actors live in the actor system, but more concrete in an actor-context. An actor-context contains a collection (of actors) and represents a Common Lisp protocol that defines a set of generic functions for creating, removing and finding actors in an actor-context. The actor system itself is also implementing the actor-context protocol, so it also acts as such and hence the protocol ac (actor-context) is used to operate on the actor system.

I.e. to shutdown the actor system one has to execute: (ac:shutdown *system*).

Creating and using actors

Now we want to create actors.

(actor-of *system* :name "answerer"
  :receive
  (lambda (msg)
    (let ((output (format nil "Hello ~a" msg)))
        (reply output))))

This creates an actor in *system*. Notice that the actor is not assigned to a variable (but you can). It is now registered in the system. Using function ac:find-actors you'll be able to find it again. Of course it makes sense to store important actors that are frequently used in a defparameter variable.

The :receive key argument to actor-of is a function which implements the message processing behaviour of an actor. The parameter to the 'receive' function is just the received message (msg).

actor-of also allows to specify the initial state, a name, and a custom actor type via key parameters. By default a standard actor of type 'actor is created. It is possible to subclass 'actor and specify your own. It is further possible to specify an 'after initialization' function, using the :init key, and 'after destroy' function using :destroy keyword. :init can, for example, be used to subscribe to the event-stream for listening to important messages.

The return value of 'receive' function is only used when using the synchronous ask-s function to 'ask' the actor. Using ask (equivalent: ?) the return value is ignored. If an answer should be provided to an asking actor, or if replying is part of an interface contract, then reply should be used.

The above actor was stored to a variable *answerer*. We can evaluate this in repl and see:

#<ACTOR path: /user/answerer, cell: #<ACTOR answerer, running: T, state: NIL, message-box: #<SENTO.MESSAGEB:MESSAGE-BOX/DP mesgb-1356, processed messages: 1, max-queue-size: 0, queue: #<SENTO.QUEUE:QUEUE-UNBOUNDED 82701A6D13>>>>

We'll see the 'path' of the actor. The prefix '/user' means that the actor was created in a user actor context of the actor system. Further we see whether the actor is 'running', its 'state' and the used 'message-box' type, by default it uses an unbounded queue.

Now, when sending a message using 'ask' pattern to the above actor like so:

(? *answerer* "FooBar")

we'll get a 'future' as result, because ?/ask is asynchronous.

#<FUTURE promise: #<BLACKBIRD-BASE:PROMISE
finished: NIL
errored: NIL
forward: NIL 80100E8B7B>>

We can check for a 'future' result. By now the answer from the *answerer* (via reply) should be available:

USER> (fresult *)
"Hello FooBar"

If the reply had not been received yet, fresult would return :not-ready. So, fresult doesn't block, it is necessary to repeatedly probe using fresult until result is other than :not-ready.

A nicer and asynchronous way without querying is to use fcompleted. Using fcompleted you setup a callback function that is called with the result when it is available. Like this:

(fcompleted
     (? *answerer* "Buzz")
     (result)
   (format t "The answer is: ~a~%" result))

Which will asynchronously print "The answer is: Hello Buzz" after a short while. This will also work when the ask/? was used with a timeout, in which case result will be a tuple of (:handler-error . <ask-timeout condition>) if the operation timed out.

Creating child actors

To build actor hierarchies one has to create actors in actors. This is of course possible. There are two options for this.

1. Actors are created as part of actor-ofs :init function like so:

(actor-of *system* 
          :name "answerer-with-child"
          :receive
          (lambda (msg)
            (let ((output (format nil "Hello ~a" msg)))
              (reply output)))
          :init
          (lambda (self)
            (actor-of self 
                      :name "child-answerer"
                      :receive 
                      (lambda (msg)
                        (let ((output (format nil "Hello-child ~a" msg)))
                          (format nil "~a~%" output))))))

Notice the context for creating 'child-answerer', it is self, which is 'answerer-with-child'.

2. Or it is possible externally like so:

(actor-of *answerer* :name "child-answerer"
    :receive 
    (lambda (msg)
        (let ((output (format nil "~a" "Hello-child ~a" msg)))
            (format nil "~a~%" output))))

This uses *answerer* context as parameter of actor-of. But has the same effect as above.

Now we can check if there is an actor in context of 'answerer-with-child':

USER> (all-actors *actor-with-child*)
(#<ACTOR path: /user/answerer-with-child/child-answerer, cell: #<ACTOR child-answerer, running: T, state: NIL, message-box: #<SENTO.MESSAGEB:MESSAGE-BOX/DP mesgb-1374, processed messages: 0, max-queue-size: 0, queue: #<SENTO.QUEUE:QUEUE-UNBOUNDED 8200A195FB>>>>)

The 'path' is what we expected: '/user/answerer-with-child/child-answerer'.

Ping Pong

Another example that only works with tell/! (fire and forget).

We have those two actors.

The 'ping' actor:

(defparameter *ping*
  (actor-of *system*
            :receive
            (lambda (msg)
              (cond
                ((consp msg)
                 (case (car msg)
                   (:start-ping
                    (progn
                      (format t "Starting ping...~%")
                      (! (cdr msg) :ping *self*)))))
                ((eq msg :pong)
                 (progn
                   (format t "pong~%")
                   (sleep 2)
                   (reply :ping)))))))

And the 'pong' actor:

(defparameter *pong*
  (actor-of *system*
            :receive
            (lambda (msg)
              (case msg
                (:ping
                 (progn
                   (format t "ping~%")
                   (sleep 2)
                   (reply :pong)))))))

The 'ping' actor understands a :start-ping message which is a cons and has as cdr the 'pong' actor instance. It also understands a :pong message as received from 'pong' actor.

The 'pong' actor only understands a :ping message. Each of the actors respond with either :ping or :pong respectively after waiting 2 seconds.

We trigger the ping-pong by doing:

(! *ping* `(:start-ping . ,*pong*))

And then see in the console like:

Starting ping...
ping
pong
ping
...

To stop the ping-pong one just has to send (! *ping* :stop) to one of them.

:stop will completely stop the actors message processing, and the actor will not be useable anymore.

Synchronous ask

At last an example for the synchronous 'ask', ask-s. It is insofar similar to ask that it provides a result to the caller. However, it is not bound to reply as with ask. Here, the return value of the 'receive' function is returned to the caller, and ask-s will block until 'receive' function returns.
Beware that ask-s will dead-lock your actor when ask-s is used to call itself.
Let's make an example:

(defparameter *s-asker*
  (actor-of *system*
            :receive
            (lambda (msg)
              (cond
                ((stringp msg)
                 (format nil "Hello ~a" msg))
                (t (format nil "Unknown message!"))))))

So we can do:

USER> (ask-s *s-asker* "Foo")
"Hello Foo"
USER> (ask-s *s-asker* 'foo)
"Unknown message!"

Dispatchers :pinned vs. :shared

Dispatchers are somewhat alike thread pools. Dispatchers of the :shared type are a pool of workers. Workers are actors using a :pinned dispatcher. :pinned just means that an actor spawns its own mailbox thread.

So :pinned and :shared are types of dispatchers. :pinned spawns its own mailbox thread, :shared uses a worker pool to handle the mailbox messages.

By default an actor created using actor-of uses a :shared dispatcher type which uses the shared message dispatcher that is automatically setup in the system.

When creating an actor it is possible to specify the dispatcher-id. This parameter specifies which 'dispatcher' should handle the mailbox queue/messages.

Please see below for more info on dispatchers.

Finding actors in the context

If actors are not directly stored in a dynamic or lexical context they can still be looked up and used. The actor-context protocol contains a function find-actors which can lookup actors in various ways. Checkout the API documentation.

Mapping futures with fmap

Let's asume we have such a simple actor that just increments the value passed to it.

(defparameter *incer*
  (actor-of *system*
            :receive (lambda (value)
                       (reply (1+ value)))))

Since ask returns a future it is possible to map multiple ask operations like this:

(-> (ask *incer* 0)
  (fmap (result)
      (ask *incer* result))
  (fmap (result)
      (ask *incer* result))
  (fcompleted (result)
      (format t "result: ~a~%" result)
    (assert (= result 3))))

ask-s and ask with timeout

A timeout (in seconds) can be specified for both ask-s and ask and is done like so:

To demonstrate this we could setup an example 'sleeper' actor:

(ac:actor-of *system* 
    :receive 
    (lambda (msg)
        (sleep 5)))

If we store this to *sleeper* and do the following, the ask-s will return a handler-error with an ask-timeout condition.

(act:ask-s *sleeper* "Foo" :time-out 2)

(:HANDLER-ERROR . #<CL-GSERVER.UTILS:ASK-TIMEOUT #x30200319F97D>)

This works similar with the ask only that the future will be fulfilled with the handler-error cons.

To get a readable error message of the condition we can do:

CL-USER> (format t "~a" (cdr *))
A timeout set to 2 seconds occurred. Cause: 
#<BORDEAUX-THREADS:TIMEOUT #x302002FAB73D> 

Note that ask-s uses the calling thread for the timeout checks.
ask uses a wheel timer to handle timeouts. The default resolution for ask timeouts is 500ms with a maximum size of wheel slots (registered timeouts) of 1000. What this means is that you can have timeouts of a multiple of 500ms and 1000 ask operations with timeouts. This default can be tweaked when creating an actor-system, see API documentation for more details.

Long running and asynchronous operations in receive

Be careful with doing long running computations in the receive function message handler, because it will block message processing. It is advised to use a third-party thread-pool or a library like lparallel to do the computations with, and return early from the receive message handler.

The computation result can be 'awaited' for in an asynchronous manner and a response to *sender* can be sent manually (via reply). The sender of the original message is set to the dynamic variable *sender*.

Due to an asynchronous callback of a computation running is a separate thread, the *sender* must be copied into a lexical environment because at the time of when the callback is executed the *sender* can have a different value.

For instance, if there is a potentially long running and asynchronous operation happening in 'receive', the original sender must be captured and the async operation executed in a lexical context, like so (receice function):

(lambda (msg)
  (case msg
    (:do-lengthy-op
     (let ((sender *sender*))
       ;; do lengthy computation
       (reply :my-later-reply sender)))
    (otherwise
      ;; do other non async stuff
      (reply :my-reply))))

Notice that for the lengthy operation the sender must be captured because if the lengthy operation is asynchronous 'receive' function is perhaps called for another message where *sender* is different. In that case sender must be supplied explicitly for reply.

See this test for more info.

Changing behavior

An actor can change its behavior. The behavior is just a lambda similar as the 'receive' function taking the message as parameter.

The default behavior of the actor is given on actor construction using :receive key.

During the lifetime of an actor the behavior can be changed using become. unbecome will restore the default behavior.

Here is an example:

(ac:actor-of *system*
             :receive
             (lambda (msg)
               (case msg
                 (:open
                  (progn
                    (unstash-all)
                    (become (lambda (msg)
                              (case msg
                                (:write
                                 ;; do something
                                 )
                                (:close
                                 (unbecome))
                                (otherwise
                                 (stash msg)))))))
                 (otherwise (stash msg)))))

Stashing messages

Stashing allows the actor to stash away messages for when the actor is in a state that doesn't allow it to handle certain messages. unstash-all can unstash all stashed messages.

See: API documentation for more info.

Creating actors without a system

It is still possible to create actors without a system. This is how you do it:

;; make an actor
(defvar *my-actor* (act:make-actor (lambda (msg)
                                     (format t "FooBar"))
                                   :name "Lone-actor"))
;; setup a thread based message box
(setf (act-cell:msgbox *my-actor*) 
      (make-instance 'mesgb:message-box/bt))

You have to take care yourself about stopping the actor and freeing resources.

Agents

An Agent is a specialized Actor. It is meant primarily for maintaining state and comes with some conveniences to do that.

To use an Agent import sento.agent package.

There is no need to subclass an Agent. Rather create a facade to customize an agent. See below.

An Agent provides three functions to use it.

• make-agent creates a new agent. Optionally specify an actor-context or define the kind of dispatcher the agent should use.
• agent-get retrieves the current state of the agent. This directly delivers the state of the agent for performance reasons. There is no message handling involved.
• agent-update updates the state of the agent
• agent-update-and-get updates the agent state and returns the new state.

All four take a lambda. The lambda for make-agent does not take a parameter. It should return the initial state of the agent. agent-get and agent-update both take a lambda that must support one parameter. This parameter represents the current state of the agent.

Let's make a simple example:

First create an agent with an initial state of 0.

(defparameter *my-agent* (make-agent (lambda () 0)))

Now update the state several times (agent-update is asynchronous and returns t immediately):

(agent-update *my-agent* (lambda (state) (1+ state)))

Finally get the state:

(agent-get *my-agent* #'identity)

This agent-get just uses the identity function to return the state as is.

So this simple agent represents a counter.

It is important to note that the retrieves state, i.e. with identity should not be modified outside the agent.

Using an agent within an actor-system

The make-agent constructor function allows to provide an optional actor-context argument that, when given, makes the constructor create the agent within the given actor-context. Another parameter dispatcher-id allows to specify the dispatcher where :shared is the default, :pinned will create the agent with a separate mailbox thread.

It also implies that the agent is destroyed then the actor-system is destroyed.

However, while actors can create hierarchies, agents can not. Also the API for creating agents in systems is different to actors. This is to make explicit that agents are treated slightly differently than actors even though under the hood agents are actors.

Wrapping an agent

While you can use the agent as in the example above it is usually advised to wrap an agent behind a more simple facade that doesn't work with lambdas and allows a more domain specific naming.

For example could a facade for the counter above look like this:

(defvar *counter-agent* nil)

(defun init-agent (initial-value)
  (setf *counter-agent* (make-agent (lambda () initial-value))))

(defun increment () (agent-update *counter-agent* #'1+))
(defun decrement () (agent-update *counter-agent* #'1-))
(defun counter-value () (agent-get *counter-agent* #'identity))

Alternatively, one can wrap an agent inside a class and provide methods for simplified access to it.

Router

A Router is a facade over a set of actors. Routers are either created with a set of actors using the default constructor router:make-router or actors can be added later.

Routers implement part of the actor protocol, so it allows to use tell, ask-s or ask which it forwards to a 'routee' (one of the actors of a router) by passing all of the given parameters. The routee is chosen by applying a strategy. The built-in default strategy a routee is chosen randomly.

The strategy can be configured when creating a router using the constructors &key parameter :strategy. The strategy is just a function that takes the number of routees and returns a routee index to be chosen for the next operation.

Currently available strategies: :random and:round-robin.

Custom strategies can be implemented.

Dispatchers

:shared

A :shared dispatcher is a facility that is set up in the actor-system. It consists of a configurable pool of 'dispatcher workers' (which are in fact actors). Those dispatcher workers execute the message handling in behalf of the actor and with the actors message handling code. This is protected by a lock so that ever only one dispatcher will run code on an actor. This is to ensure protection from data race conditions of the state data of the actor (or other slots of the actor).

Using this dispatcher allows to create a large number of actors. The actors as such are generally very cheap.

:pinned

The :pinned dispatcher is represented by just a thread that operates on the actors message queue. It handles one message after another with the actors message handling code. This also ensures protection from data race conditions of the state of the actor.

This variant is slightly faster (see below) but requires one thread per actor.

custom dispatcher

It is possible to create additional dispatcher of type :shared. A name can be freely chosen, but by convention it should be a global symbol, i.e. :my-dispatcher.

When creating actors using act:actor-of, or when using the tasks API it is possible to specify the dispatcher (via the 'dispatcher-id' i.e. :my-dispatcher) that should handle the actor, agent, or task messages.

A custom dispatcher is in particular useful when using tasks for longer running operations. Longer running operations should not be used for the :shared dispatcher because it is, by default, responsible for the message handling of most actors.

Eventstream

The eventstream allows messages (or events) to be posted on the eventstream in a fire-and-forget kind of way. Actors can subscribe to the eventstream if they want to get notified for particular messages or any message posted to the event stream.
This allows to create event-based systems.

Here is a simple example:

(defparameter *sys* (asys:make-actor-system))

(ac:actor-of *sys* :name "listener"
  :init (lambda (self)
          (ev:subscribe self self 'string))
  :receive (lambda (msg)
             (cond
               ((string= "my-message" msg)
                (format t "received event: ~a~%" msg)))))

(ev:publish *sys* "my-message")

This subscribes to all 'string based events and just prints the message when received.
The subscription here is done using the :init hook of the actor. The ev:subscribe function requires to specify the eventstream as first argument. But there are different variants of the generic function defined which allows to specify an actor directly. The eventstream is retrieve from the actor through its actor-context.

received event: my-message

See the API documentation for more details.

Tasks

'tasks' is a convenience package that makes dealing with asynchronous and concurrent operations very easy.

Here is a simple example:

(defparameter *sys* (make-actor-system))

(with-context (*sys*)
  
  // run something without requiring a feedback
  (task-start (lambda () (do-lengthy-IO))
  
  // run asynchronous - with await
  (let ((task (task-async (lambda () (do-a-task)))))
    // do some other stuff
    // eventually we need the task result
    (+ (task-await task) 5))
    
  // run asynchronous with completion-handler (continuation)
  (task-async (lambda () (some-bigger-computation))
              :on-complete-fun
              (lambda (result)
                (do-something-with result)))

  // concurrently map over the given list
  (->> 
    '(1 2 3 4 5)
    (task-async-stream #'1+)
    (reduce #'+)))

=> 20 (5 bits, #x14, #o24, #b10100)

All functions available in 'tasks' package require to be wrapped in a with-context macro. This macro removes the necessity of an additional argument to each of the functions which is instead supplied by the macro.

What happens in the example above is that the list '(1 2 3 4 5) is passed to task-async-stream. task-async-stream then spawns a 'task' for each element of the list and applies the given function (here 1+) on each list element. The function though is executed by a worker of the actor-systems :shared dispatcher. task-async-stream then also collects the result of all workers. In the last step (reduce) the sum of the elements of the result list are calculated.

It is possible to specify a second argument to the with-context macro to specify the dispatcher that should be used for the tasks.
The concurrency here depends on the number of dispatcher workers.

As alternative, or in special circumstances, it is possible to setf *task-context* and/or *task-dispatcher* special variables which allows to use tasks without with-context macro.

Be also aware that the :shared dispatcher should not run long running operations as it blocks a message processing thread. Create a custom dispatcher to use for tasks when you plan to operate longer running operations.

See the API documentation for more details.

Immutability

Some words on immutability. Actor states don't need to be immutable data structures. Sento does not make copies of the actor states. The user is responsible for the actor state and to motate the actor state only within 'receive' function.

Logging

Sento does its own logging using different log levels from 'trace' to 'error' using log4cl. If you wish to also use log4cl in your application but find that Sento is too noisy in debug and trace logging you can change the log level for the 'sento package only by:

(log:config '(sento) :warn)

This will tell log4cl to do any logging for sento in warn level.

Benchmarks

Hardware specs (M1)):

• Mac M1 Ultra, 32 GB RAM

Hardware specs (x86-64), bench of previous version, Sento 2:

• iMac Pro (2017), 8 Core Xeon, 32 GB RAM

All

Version 3 of Sento uses the jpl-queues package which is slightly slower than the lparallel cons-queue. The lparallel cons-queue package is available as separate asdf system if needed and if the additional dependency is acceptable.

The benchmark was created by having 8 threads throwing each 125k (1m altogether) messages at 1 actor. The timing was taken for when the actor did finish processing those 1m messages. The messages were sent by either all tell, ask-s, or ask to an actor whose message-box worked using a single thread (:pinned) or a dispatched message queue (:shared / dispatched) with 8 workers.

Of course a tell is in most cases the fastest one, because it's the least resource intensive and there is no place that is blocking in this workflow.

SBCL (v2.3.0)

Even though SBCL is by far the fastest one with tell on both :pinned and dispatched, it had massive problems on dispatched - ask-s where I had to lower the number of messages to 200k alltogether. Beyond that value SBCL didn't get it worked out.

LispWorks (8.0.1)

LispWorks is fast overall. Not as fast as SBCL. But it seems the GC is more robust, in particular on the dispatched - ask.

CCL (v1.12)

Unfortunately CCL doesn't work natively on M1 Apple CPU.

ABCL (1.9)

The pleasant surprise was ABCL. While not being the fastest it is the most robust. Where SBCL and CCL were struggling you could throw anything at ABCL and it'll cope with it. I'm assuming that this is because of the massively battle proven Java Runtime.

Migration guide for moving from Sento 2 to Sento 3

• the receive function is now 1-arity. It only takes the a message parameter.

Previous 'self' and 'state' parameters are now accessible via *self* and *state*. The same applies to become function.

• the return value of 'receive' function has always been a bit of an obstacle. So now it is ignored for tell and ask. In both cases a reply function can be used to reply to a sender. reply implicitly uses *sender* but can be overriden (see 'long running and asynchronous operations in receive'). The 'receive' function return value is still relevant for ask-s, but now it doesn't need to be a cons. Whatever is returned is received by ask-s.

• the lparallel dependency was removed to reduce dependencies. However, the cons-queue of lparallel is very fast (used for unbounded message queue) so an additional 'sento-high-speed-queue' asdf system has been added to bring back the lparallel cons-queue if performance is critical. It brings an additional 10%-30% boost.

• 'utils' package has been split to 'timeutils' for i.e. ask-timeout condition, and 'miscutils' for i.e. filter function.

Version history

Version 3.0.0 (1.2.2023): New major version. See migration guide if you have are migrating from version 2.

Version 2.2.0 (27.12.2022): Added stashing and unstashing of messages.

Version 2.1.0 (17.11.2022): Reworked the future package. Nicer syntax and futures can now be mapped.

Version 2.0.0 (16.8.2022): Rename to "Sento". Incompatible change due to package names and system have changed.

Version 1.12.2 (29.5.2022): Removed the logging abstraction again. Less code to maintain. log4cl is featureful enough for users to either use it, or use something else in the applications that are based on sento.

Version 1.12.1 (25.5.2022): Shutdown and stop of actor, actor context and actor system can now wait for a full shutdown/stop of all actors to really have a clean system shutdown.

Version 1.12.0 (26.2.2022): Refactored and cleaned up the available actor-of facilities. There is now only one. If you used the macro before, you may have to adapt slightly.

Version 1.11.1 (25.2.2022): Minor additions to actor-of macro to allow specifying a destroy function.

Version 1.11.0 (16.1.2022): Changes to AC:FIND-ACTORS. Breaking API change. See API documentation for details.

Version 1.10.0: Logging abstraction. Use your own logging facility. sento doesn't lock you in but provides support for log4cl. Support for other logging facilities can be easily added so that the logging of sento will use your chosen logging library. See below for more details.

Version 1.9.0: Use wheel timer for ask timeouts.

Version 1.8.2: atomic add/remove of actors in actor-context.

Version 1.8.0: hash-agent interface changes. Added array-agent.

Version 1.7.6: Added cl:hash-table based agent with similar API interface.

Version 1.7.5: Allow agent to specify the dispatcher to be used.

Version 1.7.4: more convenience additions for task-async (completion-handler)

Version 1.7.3: cleaned up dependencies. Now sento works on SBCL, CCL, LispWorks, Allegro and ABCL

Version 1.7.2: allowing to choose the dispatcher strategy via configuration

Version 1.7.1: added possibility to create additional and custom dispatchers. I.e. to be used with tasks.

Version 1.7.0: added tasks abstraction facility to more easily deal with asynchronous and concurrent operations.

Version 1.6.0: added eventstream facility for building event based systems. Plus documentation improvements.

Version 1.5.0: added configuration structure. actor-system can now be created with a configuration. More configuration options to come.

Version 1.4.1: changed documentation to the excellent mgl-pax

Version 1.4: convenience macro for creating actor. See below for more details

Version 1.3.1: round-robin strategy for router

Version 1.3: agents can be created in actor-system

Version 1.2: introduces a breaking change

ask has been renamed to ask-s.

async-ask has been renamed to ask.

The proposed default way to query for a result from another actor should be an asynchronous ask. ask-s (synchronous) is of course still possible.

Version 1.0 of sento library comes with quite a few new features (compared to the previous 0.x versions). One of the major new features is that an actor is not bound to it's own message dispatcher thread. Instead, when an actor-system is set-up, actors can use a shared pool of message dispatchers which effectively allows to create millions of actors.

It is now possible to create actor hierarchies. An actor can have child actors. An actor now can also 'watch' another actor to get notified about it's termination.

It is also possible to specify timeouts for the ask-s and ask functionality.

This new version is closer to Akka (the actor model framework on the JVM) than to GenServer on Erlang. This is because Common Lisp from a runtime perspective is closer to JVM than to Erlang/OTP. Threads in Common Lisp are heavy weight OS threads rather than user-space low weight 'Erlang' threads (I'd like to avoid 'green threads', because threads in Erlang are not really green threads). While on Erlang it is easily possible to spawn millions of processes/threads and so each actor (GenServer) has its own process, this model is not possible when the threads are OS threads, because of OS resource limits. This is the main reason for working with the message dispatcher pool instead.