Friday, May 30, 2014

Version 0.9.3 released ... under the Boost Software License!

Version 0.9.3 of libcppa has just been released. The biggest change this time around is the switch from LGPL to the Boost Software License 1.0. If you are working in one of those companies that prohibit LGPL-licensed code, you are finally able to use actors in your day-to-day programming.

Due to the everlasting problems with the Boost.Context-based context-switching actor implementation, this features is now turned off by default. To re-enable it, use the --enable-context-switching option of the configure script. Since this feature is of limited use anyways, we consider removing it completely in a future version. We don't think it is worth the maintenance effort in the long run.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Issues with Boost on Ubuntu

As reported by users of libcppa, the library fails to compile - or rather: to link - on the latest Ubuntu release with Boost. To get a running version of libcppa, please configure it using ./configure --standalone-build. This will disable the context-switching feature of libcppa. Context-switching is only relevant in case you want to have cooperative scheduling of blocking actors. When disabling this feature, all blocking actors are implicitly detached.

Since Boost only enables context-switching, we are considering to turn this feature into an opt-in rather than an opt-out at compile time. In case your system is lacking Boost, you won't get the context-switching actors anyways (and will not be affected by this error). Other parts of the library do not depend on Boost, so there is no degradation of performance or functionality.

If you run into a similar error on a different Linux distribution, please let me know.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Version 0.9 released!

Version 0.9 of libcppa has just been released. It features an all-new work-stealing scheduler. Expect new benchmark results in the near future as the last evaluation is heavily outdated by now.

Aside from performance performance tweaks, version 0.9 also features an improved broker interface covered in a new manual section as well as a new example.