I finally had the chance to use Akka Typed, and wanted to share my experience. So basically, I took a small demo project that was based on untyped actors, and implemented it using typed ones. (This is based on 2.4.8, but I think most of it is still relevant)
To start off with the good things: * Typed actors completely eliminated bugs involving mixing up `ActorRef`s - passing wrong refs, mixing up order of parameters, sending responses to the wrong place. * The functional approach taken for typed actors (behaviors returning the next behavior) also eliminated bugs that revolved around "doing stuff from `Future` callbacks". * The thing I was probably worried about most - not having `sender` any more - turned out to be a non-issue. In fact, because now it has to be on the received message, it makes it immutable, thus helping with the `Future`-related bugs. Now for the "annoyances" (in no specific order): * Using the various factory methods to create behaviors means you don't have direct access to "protected" behavior methods, most notably the ActorContext. If you need it, you either use `Actor.immutable` and get a "new" context with each message, or you use Actor.deferred which is a bit more clunky (you need a function that returns a behavior, which is itself a function). * This is more of a Scala type-inference issue, but having to specify the type when using `ask` is pretty annoying. What seems to work best for me is having utility methods on the "actor" that return `ActorRef[Response] => Message`, but it's a bit boilerplatey. * Another issue related to asking is that there is no equivalent to untyped ask's Status.Failure. If the "request" can fail, this has to be modeled in the response (replying with a `Try`, or something equivalent), and means that now the caller has 3 cases to handle instead of 2. So now instead of ask-map-pipe in one line, it turns into ask-transform(3 cases)-foreach. * No "easy" access to logging - there's already a PR waiting for this, so not really an issue. Overall, though, I have to say it's shaping up real nicely. I'm looking forward to see what happens to it next. Tal -- >>>>>>>>>> Read the docs: http://akka.io/docs/ >>>>>>>>>> Check the FAQ: >>>>>>>>>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/additional/faq.html >>>>>>>>>> Search the archives: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Akka User List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
