Phony

Phony is a Pony-inspired proof-of-concept implementation of shared-memory actor-model concurrency in the Go programming language. Actors automatically manage goroutines and use asynchronous causal messaging (with backpressure) for communcation. This makes it easy to write programs that are free from deadlocks, goroutine leaks, and many of the for loops over select statements that show up in boilerplate code. The down side is that the code needs to be written in an asynchronous style, which is not idiomatic to Go, so it can take some getting used to.

Benchmarks

goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/Arceliar/phony
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10300H CPU @ 2.50GHz
BenchmarkLoopActor-8                	38022962	        29.83 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkLoopChannel-8              	29876192	        38.50 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkSendActor-8                	14235270	        82.94 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkSendChannel-8              	 8372472	       143.9 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkRequestResponseActor-8     	10360731	       116.6 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkRequestResponseChannel-8   	 4226506	       285.8 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkBlock-8                    	 2662929	       450.9 ns/op	      32 B/op	       2 allocs/op
PASS
ok  	github.com/Arceliar/phony	9.463s

These are microbenchmarks, but they seem to indicate that Actor messaging and goroutine+channel operations have comparable cost. I suspect that the difference is negligible in most applications.

Implementation Details

The code base is short, under 100 source lines of code as of writing, so reading the code is probably the best way to see what it does, but that doesn't necessarily explain why certain design decisions were made. To elaborate on a few things:

• Phony only depends on packages from the standard library:

  • runtime for some scheduler manipulation (Gosched()).
  • sync for sync.Pool, to minimize allocations.
  • sync/atomic to implement the Inbox's message queues.

• Attempts were make to make embedding and composition work:

  • Actor is an interface satisfied by the Inbox struct.
  • The zero value of an Inbox is a fully initialized and ready-to-use Actor
  • This means any struct that anonymously embeds an Inbox is an Actor
  • structs that don't want to export the Actor interface can embed it as a field instead.

• Inbox was implemented with scalability in mind:

  • The Inbox is basically an atomically updated single-consumer multiple-producer linked list.
  • Pushing a message is wait-free -- no locks, spinlocks, or CompareAndSwap loops.
  • Popping messages is wait-free in the normal case, with a busy loop (LoadPointer) if popping the last message lost a race with a push.
  • When backpressure is required, it's implemented by sending two extra messages (one to the receiver of the original message, and one to the sender).

• The implementation aims to be as lightweight as reasonably possible:

  • On x86_64, an empty Inbox is 24 bytes, and messages overhead is 16 bytes, or half that on x86.
  • An Actor with an empty Inbox has no goroutine.
  • This means that idle Actors can be collected as garbage when they're no longer reachable, just like any other struct.