pykka 0.1

Pykka is easy to use concurrency using the actor model

Pykka is a concurrency abstraction which makes actors look like regular objects.

It lets you call methods on an actor like you would on a regular object, but it runs the code in the actor’s own thread. Similarily, when you access the actor’s fields, they are read in the actor’s thread, serialized and copied to the reading thread.

Both method calling and attribute reads returns futures which ensures that the calling thread does not block before the value from the object’s thread is actually used.

Pykka is similar to typed actors in the Akka framework.

What can it do?

Given the following code:

from pykka import Actor

class Adder(Actor):
    def add_one(self, i):
        print '%s: %d' % (self.name, i)
        return i + 1

class Counter(Actor):
    def count_to(self, target):
        i = 0
        while i < target:
            print '%s: %d' % (self.name, i)
            i = self.other.add_one(i + 1).get()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    adder = Adder().start()
    counter = Counter(other=adder).start()
    counter.count_to(10).get() # Block until finished
    counter.stop()
    adder.stop()

We get the following output:

$ PYTHONPATH=. python examples/counter.py
Thread-2: 0
Thread-1: 1
Thread-2: 2
Thread-1: 3
Thread-2: 4
Thread-1: 5
Thread-2: 6
Thread-1: 7
Thread-2: 8
Thread-1: 9

See the examples/ dir for more runnable examples.

License

Pykka is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.