Recipe for "actor class" style stuff like ray and pykka

[goodboy]

Though I'm pretty much entirely against apis of this sort:

1. because they're imo entirely superfluous and use classes unnecessarily, and
2. because they're enforcing behind-the-scenes object setup and persistence (that definitely isn't required to get actor behavior) which you don't really need for holding long running state if running trio task functions in separate thread sessions, communicating over our channels,
3. because most of these systems rely on the futures/promises paradigm which trio explicitly avoids and thus most of why you would want a method-as-callback api is moot,

but, it seems users coming from the actor systems space are confused when they don't see apis of this sort.

Thus, I propose we at least have a (couple) recipe(s) to show how such things can be accomplished.

#190 is one effort on this front for @fjarri.

Some examples from the mentioned projects:

• ray's actors are basically just classes instantiated and persisted in a thread - further I would argue these aren't real actors as in the actor model (they can't spawn other actors [at least obviously] and don't send messages to one another other then through these remote handle api - which is really just a form of proxy api:

@ray.remote
class Counter(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.value = 0

    def increment(self):
        self.value += 1
        return self.value

    def get_counter(self):
        return self.value

counter_actor = Counter.remote()

• pykka has a similar api but they actually have explicit message passing and call a remote handle api for what is is, a proxy

import pykka

class Calculator(pykka.ThreadingActor):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.last_result = None

    def add(self, a, b=None):
        if b is not None:
            self.last_result = a + b
        else:
            self.last_result += a
        return self.last_result

    def sub(self, a, b=None):
        if b is not None:
            self.last_result = a - b
        else:
            self.last_result -= a
        return self.last_result

actor_ref = Calculator.start()

We have wanted a proxy style wrapping for a few things in piker which is shown in small degrees in #190.

I would be interested to hear more opinions and complaints in this arena.

[goodboy]

It's probably worth replicating some of the examples from both of these projects for newcomers to see the trio/tractor way:

• pykka's examples: https://www.pykka.org/en/latest/examples/#examples
  • we can def pwn this pool of actors sharing work snippet
• rays "actor" examples: https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/auto_examples/overview.html#ray-examples

Some extra interesting stuff from ray:

• they can pass around handles between remotes (which makes sense since the default is to use shared memory threads afaiu) but it seems there are limitations cross-process where you have to use named actors as we would expect (you can't hack IPC).
• they definitely don't adhere to SC with allowing lifetime="detached"
• their semantics are pretty convoluted

A Ray Actor is also a “Ray worker” but is instantiated at runtime (upon actor_cls.remote()). All of its methods will run on the same process, using the same resources (designated when defining the Actor). Note that unlike tasks, the python processes that runs Ray Actors are not reused and will be terminated when the Actor is deleted.

In other words, they seem to think having a "persistent class" makes something an "actor" for some reason, when really their "workers running tasks" are more likely to viewed as the "actors" from actor model theory.

• here's a streaming map-reduce example
  • it's also notable that they've rolled their own Rx style api yet again like many other projects.
  • this wikipedia word count example might be a good spot to pwn them in terms of LOC 🏄🏼