Personal blog of Stein Magnus Jodal Zola 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00 https://jodal.dev/tags/actors/atom.xml 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://jodal.dev/2019/05/07/pykka-2.0/

<p>I’ve finally released <a rel="external" href="https://pykka.readthedocs.io/">Pykka</a> 2.0, the first major update to Pykka in almost six years.</p> <p>Pykka is a Python implementation of the actor model. The actor model introduces some simple rules to control the sharing of state and cooperation between execution units, which makes it easier to build concurrent applications.</p> <p>Pykka 2.0 is a major release because it is backwards incompatible in several minor ways. However, the backwards incompatible changes should only affect quite narrow use cases. Mopidy and its extensions, which is the largest open source ecosystem I know of that uses Pykka, runs unmodified on Pykka 2.0.</p> <p>In this blog post I’ll go through some of the more important improvements in 2.0.</p>

2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00 2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://jodal.dev/2011/03/29/pykka-and-porting-pykka-to-python-3/

<p>This is somewhat of an introduction to <a rel="external" href="https://pykka.readthedocs.io/">Pykka</a>, a Python library implementing the actor model, which I’ve been working on now and then since November. And it’s still just 300 lines of code!</p> <p>The goal of the actor model is to make it easier to develop concurrent programs by removing all shared state and use messaging for all communication. Removing shared state and doing lots of messaging doesn’t make anything easier by itself, but it avoids common problems in concurrent programs like proper lock usage and data corruption (due to the absence of proper lock usage). Also, I believe the actor model makes it easier to reason about concurrent programs, which is a nice property since software development often feels like 10% development and 91% debugging.</p>