Actors.

‘Speedy Gonzales’ Serializing (Re)Actors via Allocators

by "No Bugs" Hare

From the article:

As we briefly discussed in Part I of this mini-series [NoBugs17a], message-passing technologies such as (Re)Actors (a.k.a. Actors, Reactors, ad hoc FSMs, and event-driven programs) have numerous advantages – ranging from being debuggable (including post-factum production debugging), to providing better overall performance.

In [NoBugs17a] and [NoBugs17b], we discussed an approach to handling allocations for (Re)Actors, and then were able to achieve a safe dialect of C++ (that is, as long as we’re following a set of well-defined local rules). Now, let’s take a look at another task which can be facilitated by per-(Re)Actor allocators – specifically, at the task of serializing (Re)Actors that are later going to be de-serialized by the same executable. While one solution for this task was provided in [Ignatchenko-Ivanchykhin16], the proposed ‘ultra-fast’ serialization is rather cumbersome to maintain, and in most cases it can be beaten performance-wise by serializing at the allocator level...