CALF: C++ Actor Light Framework

CALF is a cross-compatible, lightweight, open source implementation of the actor model for C++. Lightweight means there is not much code and, not many dependencies. In contrast to CAF: C++ Actor Framework, CALF aims to provide just the features you need with low overhead. Cross-platform compatible, it was designed on a linux system using standard c++, has been compiled and tested on OSX, and should, if needed, run on Windows with some minor adjustments.

Who is CALF for?

• CALF is for you if you have a small or medium project that is suited to the actor model framework, and you don't need advanced features such as synchronous messages or distributed across computers.
• CALF is for you is you need a simple actor model framework to facilitate passing of messages between software components (actors), either for private or commercial use.
• CALF is for you if CAF or other actor and messaging frameworks seem like overkill. CALF needs C++11 minimum, and has no dependency on Boost. CALF uses the std c++ library (including std::thread) and has a dependency of pugixml, itself an open-source lightweight library.

What Features does CALF provide?

• CALF has been designed ground-up to be thread-safe. All the usual advice applies when coding a multi-threaded program, suffice to say, the messaging platform inside CALF has been battle-tested in a multi-threaded environment.
• CALF has basic monitoring built-in. Total messages and current messages stats for all actors can be summoned at any time.
• CALF has a logging system and ini handler at the user's disposal.

Who wrote CALF?

• CALF was written by me, Craig Phillips. I can be contacted through my work website: https://www.softwareguru.ca
• It was time for me to give something back to the open-source community. It is my hope that someone out there finds this useful, as I have found useful so much open source software for my own projects. CALF is licensed under MIT license terms.
• I would be delighted if people want to contribute to the project by way of bug fixes or enhancements, but please bear in mind the mantra of this project. I don't intend for this to grow into a larger messaging platform. Those exist already.

How do I build CALF ?

• By default, CALF uses CMake to build itself, so:

cd build
cmake -DBUILD_DEMO=ON .
make

will build a static library you can use in your project. Or, since there's not many files, you could reference the source code directly into your own build or makefile.

• It doesn't make much sense to build a shared object of CALF — because it includes main() — so it can't be shared by multiple applications. It's a framework, not a utility library.
• The use of std::threads will pull in a dependency on a thread implementation, typically pthreads on 'nix systems.
• The CALF library has a dependency on pugixml, so you would need to build that. Thankfully, pugixml is also open-source, on github, and uses CMake. So:

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/zeux/pugixml.git
cd pugixml
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

will build and install pugixml for you. Again, you could chose to include the few files in your own build or Makefile, but this would be the CMake approach.

How do I use CALF?

• There is a USER-GUIDE.md file in the same directory of this README.md file that outlines how to use CALF in your project. Also, you'll find a sample program in the test/ directory which is reasonably well-commented.