+972 52-548-6969
A minimal actor framework
Originally posted at 4/29/2011
For one of our projects, we need the ability to asynchronously push changes through a socket, since we actually care about the order of actions, we realized that we couldn’t really use purely async IO. For example, consider the following actions:
connection.Send(“abc”);
connection.Send(“def”);
I care that abc will be sent before def, and I care that all of abc will be sent before anything else is sent through that connection. What I don’t care about is whatever I have anything else sent between abc and def.
All of that can be had using:
public class Actor<TState> { public TState State { get; set; } private readonly ConcurrentQueue<Action<TState>> actions = new ConcurrentQueue<Action<TState>>(); private Task activeTask; public void Act(Action<TState> action) { actions.Enqueue(action); if (activeTask != null) return; lock(this) { if (activeTask != null) return; activeTask = Task.Factory.StartNew(ExecuteActions); } } private void ExecuteActions() { Action<TState> action; while (actions.TryDequeue(out action)) { action(State); } lock(this) { activeTask = null; } } }
The actions will execute synchronously for each actor, and it satisfy my requirement for how to deal with this quite nicely, even if I say so myself 
In truth, the code above isn’t really good. Can you consider ways to improve this?
Comments
Comment preview