Hiactor

What is Hiactor

Hiactor is an open-source hierarchical actor framework for building high-performance，concurrent and scalable event-driven systems using C++. Hiactor features a light-weight and ease-of-use distributed implementation of the actor model with concepts like object, reference and future/promise. With Hiactor, developers familiar with single-server programming can experience a seamless transition to the distributed environments.

Building Hiactor

Requirements:

• A compiler with good C++17 support (e.g. gcc >= 9.0). This was tested successfully on g++ 9.4.0.
• A higher version linux system is recommended. This was tested successfully on Ubuntu 20.04.
• CMake >= 3.13.1

Hiactor has a dependency of Seastar. Before building Hiactor, update the project submodules and install dependencies for Seastar:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ sudo ./seastar/seastar/install-dependencies.sh

Next, build Hiactor as follows:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake [OPTIONS] ..
$ make
$ make install

The following cmake options can be specified:

• Hiactor_DEBUG: Build Hiactor with debug mode. Default is OFF.
• Hiactor_INSTALL: Enable installing Hiactor targets. Default is ON.
• Hiactor_DEMOS: Enable demos of Hiactor. Default is ON.
• Hiactor_TESTING: Enable tests of Hiactor. Default is ON.
• Hiactor_GPU_ENABLE: Enable gpu devices for Hiactor (Cuda environments required!) Default is OFF.
• Hiactor_DPDK: Enable DPDK support for Hiactor. Default is OFF.
• Hiactor_CXX_DIALECT: Specify the C++ dialect for Hiactor. Default is gnu++17.
• Hiactor_CXX_FLAGS: Specify other compilation flags for Hiactor.
• Hiactor_COOK_DEPENDENCIES: Whether to download and build Seastar's dependencies for use if you don't want to use system packages (RPMs or DEBs). Default is OFF.
• Hiactor_COOK_EXCLUDES: A semicolon-separated list of dependency names to exclude from building if Hiactor_COOK_DEPENDENCIES is enabled.
• Hiactor_CPU_STALL_REPORT: Enable warning reports at cpu stalls. Default is OFF.
• Hiactor_UNUSED_RESULT_ERROR: Make [[nodiscard]] violations an error (instead of a warning). Default is OFF.

Seastar is embedded with add_subdirectory in hiactor, you can add cmake options of Seastar directly when configuring. Note that the apps, demos, docs and tests of Seastar are disabled in its embedding mode, besides, Seastar_CXX_DIALECT will be overridden by Hiactor_CXX_DIALECT and Seastar_DPDK will be overridden by Hiactor_DPDK.

An example cmake options:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DHiactor_CXX_DIALECT=gnu++17 \
    -DHiactor_TESTING=OFF -DSeastar_CXX_FLAGS="-DSEASTAR_DEFAULT_ALLOCATOR" ..

Getting started

Follow the tutorial to understand how to use Hiactor.