Repository files navigation

CAF is an open source framework that offers a programming environment based ontheActor Model of computationcombined with ascalable,nativeruntime environment that lets you build applications at a high level ofabstraction without sacrificing performance. Whether you are targeting a singlemachine, a data center, or the cloud, CAF provides the necessary tools toimplement robust, scalable, and maintainable software.

CAF features lightweight & fast actor implementations, data flows, HTTP andWebSocket support, pattern matching for messages, metrics, distributed actors,and more. Professional support, training, and consulting are available fromInterance, the company behind CAF.

• Homepage:https://www.actor-framework.org
• Guides and Tutorials:https://www.interance.io/learning
• Manual:https://actor-framework.readthedocs.io
• Doxygen:https://www.actor-framework.org/doxygen
• Developer Blog:https://www.actor-framework.org/blog

• Open Issues on GitHub:https://github.com/actor-framework/actor-framework/issues/new
• Ask Questions on StackOverflow:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?tags=c%2b%2b-actor-framework

• Chat:https://gitter.im/actor-framework/chat
• Mastodon:https://fosstodon.org/@caf
• Twitter:https://twitter.com/actor_framework
• Mailing List:https://groups.google.com/d/forum/actor-framework

We do not officially maintain packages for CAF. However, some of our communitymembers made packages available for these package managers:

• Conan
• FreeBSD Ports
• Homebrew.
• VCPKG
• Fedora

git clone https://github.com/actor-framework/actor-framework.gitcd actor-framework

CAF usesCMake as its build system of choice. To makebuilding CAF more convenient from the command line, we provide aconfigurescript that wraps the CMake invocation. The script only works on UNIX systems.On Windows, we recommend generating an MSVC project file via CMake for nativebuilds.

The script is a convenient frontend forCMake. Seeconfigure -h for a listof available options. By default, the script creates abuild directory andasks CMake to generate aMakefile. A build with default settings generallyfollows these steps:

./configurecd buildmakemaketest [optional]make install [as root, optional]

To generate a Makefile for building CAF with default settings, either use aCMake GUI or perform this step on the command line:

cmake -S<path-to-caf-sources> -B build

After this step,cmake -LH prints the most useful configuration options forCAF, their default value, and a helptext.

Other CMake projects can add CAF as a dependency by usingfind_package andlisting the required modules (e.g.,core ornet) . When installing CAF to anon-standard location, setCAF_ROOT prior to callingfind_package.

• CMake (for building CAF)
• OpenSSL (when building theopenssl ornet module)

C++ is an evolving language. Compiler vendors constantly add more language andstandard library features. Since CAF runs on many platforms, this means we needa policy that on the one hand ensures that we only use a widely supported subsetof C++ and on the other hand that we naturally progress with the shiftinglandscape to eventually catch up to more recent C++ additions (in order to not"get stuck").

So instead of singling out individual compiler versions, we build CAF for eachcommit on all platforms that we currently deem relevant. Everything that passesour CI is "fair game".

Our CI covers Windows (latest MSVC release), macOS (latest Xcode release),FreeBSD (latest) and several Linux distributions (via the Docker images foundhere). ForLinux, we aim to support the current releases (that still receive activesupport) for the major distributions. Note that we do not build on Linuxdistributions with rolling releases, because they generally provide more recentbuild tools than distributions with traditional release schedules and thus wouldonly add redundancy.

• Building an offline version of the manual requiresSphinx:

  cd manualsphinx-build. html

• Building an offline version of the API reference documentation requiresDoxygen (simply run thedoxygen command at theroot directory of the repository).

If you use CAF in a scientific context, please use one of the following citations:

@inproceedings{cshw-nassp-13,author ={Dominik Charousset and Thomas C. Schmidt and Raphael Hiesgen and Matthias W{\"a}hlisch},title ={{Native Actors -- A Scalable Software Platform for Distributed, Heterogeneous Environments}},booktitle ={Proc. of the 4rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications (SPLASH '13), Workshop AGERE!},pages ={87--96},month ={Oct.},year ={2013},publisher ={ACM},address ={New York, NY, USA}}@article{chs-rapc-16,author ={Dominik Charousset and Raphael Hiesgen and Thomas C. Schmidt},title ={{Revisiting Actor Programming in C++}},journal ={Computer Languages, Systems \& Structures},volume ={45},year ={2016},month ={April},pages ={105--131},publisher ={Elsevier}}

You can find the papers online athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2541329.2541336 andhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.002.