C++ Actor Framework

Online Resources

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

Report Bugs and Get Help

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

Community

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

Get CAF

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

Get the Sources

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

Build CAF from Source

CAF uses CMake as its build system of choice. To make building CAF more convenient from the command line, we provide a configure script that wraps the CMake invocation. The script only works on UNIX systems. On Windows, we recommend generating an MSVC project file via CMake for native builds.

Using the `configure` Script

The script is a convenient frontend for CMake. See configure -h for a list of available options. By default, the script creates a build directory and asks CMake to generate a Makefile. A build with default settings generally follows these steps:

./configure
cd build
make
make test [optional]
make install [as root, optional]

Using CMake

To generate a Makefile for building CAF with default settings, either use a CMake 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 for CAF, their default value, and a helptext.

Other CMake projects can add CAF as a dependency by using find_package and listing the required modules (e.g., core or net) . When installing CAF to a non-standard location, set CAF_ROOT prior to calling find_package.

Dependencies

CMake (for building CAF)
OpenSSL (when building the openssl or net module)

Build Documentation Locally

Building an offline version of the manual requires Sphinx:
```
cd manual
sphinx-build . html
```
Building an offline version of the API reference documentation requires Doxygen (simply run the doxygen command at the root directory of the repository).

Scientific Use

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 at http://dx.doi.org/10.¹¹⁴⁵⁄_2541329.2541336 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.002.