C++Now 2014

The actor model offers a message-oriented programming paradigm that makes concurrent & distributed applications less error-prone, easier to write, understand, and debug than standard C++ facilities. In this talk, we will survey concepts and support offered by libcppa to build complex distributed applications in C++.

In the first half of this talk, Dominik Charousset will give an introduction to actor programming in C++ with a focus on new developments since C++Now in 2013. In particular, these new features include type-safe interfaces for actors that enable strongly typed messaging in distributed applications.

The second half of the talk, Matthias Vallentin will cover a case study about the scalability of VAST, a distributed database built with libcppa. This system uses actors not only to facilitate network transparency in cluster-based deployments, but also as a unit of fine-grained parallelism to speed up tasks on the critical path, such as data ingestion and query processing. Through analysis of profiler results, we showcase how to parallelize bottleneck components in parallel processing pipelines. Furthermore, we illustrate how libcppa's actor model helps to design a distributed indexing system.

 Vallentin's portion of this talk will not be recorded.