libcppa - Designing an Actor Semantic for C++11

TL;DR

The paper introduces libcppa, an open source C++11 library that implements the actor model to simplify concurrent programming, aiming to improve reliability and distribution capabilities while maintaining high performance.

Contribution

It presents libcppa, a novel C++11 library that brings actor-based concurrency to native programming, bridging the gap between low-level primitives and high-level concurrency models.

Findings

libcppa enables reliable distributed systems in C++11.

The actor model implementation outperforms traditional thread-based approaches.

libcppa simplifies concurrent programming with high resource efficiency.

Abstract

Parallel hardware makes concurrency mandatory for efficient program execution. However, writing concurrent software is both challenging and error-prone. C++11 provides standard facilities for multiprogramming, such as atomic operations with acquire/release semantics and RAII mutex locking, but these primitives remain too low-level. Using them both correctly and efficiently still requires expert knowledge and hand-crafting. The actor model replaces implicit communication by sharing with an explicit message passing mechanism. It applies to concurrency as well as distribution, and a lightweight actor model implementation that schedules all actors in a properly pre-dimensioned thread pool can outperform equivalent thread-based applications. However, the actor model did not enter the domain of native programming languages yet besides vendor-specific island solutions. With the open source library libcppa, we want to combine the ability to build reliable and distributed systems provided by the actor model with the performance and resource-efficiency of C++11.