Pigeon – Akka Actors for .NET

I’m working on a port of the Java/Scala framework Akka, or rather the Actor Model part of it.
As of now, this is only a bit more than a weekend hack, so don’t expect too much.
But I already have a couple of nice features in:

Git hub repository goes here: https://github.com/rogeralsing/Pigeon

Write your first actor:

public class Greet : IMessage
{
    public string Who { get; set; }
}

public class GreetingActor : UntypedActor
{
    protected override void OnReceive(IMessage message)
    {
        message.Match()
            .With(m => Console.WriteLine("Hello {0}", m.Who));
    }
}

Usage:

var system = new ActorSystem();
var greeter = system.ActorOf("greeter");
greeter.Tell(new Greet { Who = "Roger" }, ActorRef.NoSender);

Remoting support:

//Server Program.CS
var system = ActorSystemSignalR.Create("myserver", "http://localhost:8080);
var greeter = system.ActorOf("greeter");
Console.ReadLine();

//Client Program.CS
var system = new ActorSystem();
var greeter = system.ActorSelection("http://localhost:8080/greeter");
//pass a message to the remote actor
greeter.Tell(new Greet { Who = "Roger" }, ActorRef.NoSender);

There are still alot of things that needs to be implemented/fixed.
Actor paths don’t work correctly at the momeent for example.
Supervision and other features are missing etc.

One nice feature I managed to squeeze in was “Futures”.
Futures in Akka is pretty much Task of T in .NET.
However, Futures in Akka is synchronous and you need to (bussy) wait for them to complete.
[edit]
As Alexey Romanov pointed out in the comments, this is not true.
You can get async futures using either onComplete callbacks,
or using Scala async support https://github.com/scala/async and use async/await.

In Pigeon however, we have Async/Await support.

You can async await responses from other actors like this:

//inside an actor
var result = await Ask(someActor, messageToAsk);
result.Match()
    .With(m => {
         Console.WriteLine("got awaited result {0}",m);
    })
    .Default(_ => Console.WriteLine("Unknown message"));

The nice thing is that the await continuation will execute in the actor context, so there is no threading issues inside the actor here.

Hope you like it 🙂