[armedbear-devel] Futile attempt at using Akka

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 9:29 PM, ubikation _ <ubikation at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been playing around with Common Lisp for a while and I really want to
> get this idea working.
>
> I have been reading a lot about Akka, but I'm not really a
> Java/Scala/distributed guy. To my understanding, Akka is an agnostic way to
> create Actors that can send messages at varying speeds, speeding up with the
> available memory and cores and easily extending itself for distributed
> communication via remote Actors.
> I'm not an expert by any means, so feel free to correct me on the
> description.
>
> I would like to create bindings to this example
> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.1.2/java/untyped-actors.html and it was
> suggested to me that I might use "java:jnew-runtime-class" by the very nice
> ehu on #abcl.

Hi! Yes, jnew-runtime-class could be the right tool for the job.
However, sadly, it appears to have suffered from bit rot, and I can't
get it to work on a recent ABCL. I have said many times that I would
have resumed working on it sooner or later, but never actually did it.
Now I have some spare time, so I might be able at least to make it
work again.

Since UntypedActor is a function-like class (single abstract method or
SAM), another effective way of tackling the problem is to code, in
Java, a small class that extends UntypedActor and wraps a Lisp
function. I've done it before (e.g. see [1] for a slightly more
complex case) and while it is not ideal (it complicates the build
process), you can quickly forget about it and build more useful
abstractions upon it.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/dynaspring/source/browse/trunk/src/dynaspring/support/LispFactoryBean.java

> My repository is at https://github.com/ubikation/chemicalambda if anyone is
> interested in my progress or wants a better idea of where I am (not really
> beyond starting the project at the moment).
>
> At the minimum I would like to create bindings, but I would like to do
> something more interesting after I get some stuff working.
>
> I do not know what I am doing at all, but I am hoping that creating these
> bindings will help solidify my understanding of Common Lisp and of ABCL in
> particular.

Well, I think a Lisp library based on Akka would be cool. It would at
least give ABCL an edge over other implementations that don't have
such a thing.

> Thanks again!

Thanks to you for your interest in ABCL and Akka! :)

Alessio
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