I have watched the "Kotlin Coroutines in Practice"...

# coroutines

[tseisel]

I have watched the "Kotlin Coroutines in Practice" talk by Roman Elizarov and learned about the Actor pattern to confine shared mutable state to a coroutine. In this talk, actors are defined using a function whose parameters are ReceiveChannel (for inputs) or SendChannel (for outputs).
Since those actors are defined as functions, how does they relate to classes ? Does anyone has concrete examples of how to structure a program with coroutines-based actors ?

[Allan Wang]

If you look at the source for actors, they basically create a channel, allow you to define some behaviour on item receivers, then close them when the job closes.

So class wise it’s basically just channels with an added on close handler

[Allan Wang]

The actor method is also going to be obsolete:

https://kotlin.github.io/kotlinx.coroutines/kotlinx-coroutines-core/kotlinx.coroutines.channels/actor.html

[pakoito]

@tseisel the best documentation you’ll find is in other languages. I’d suggest looking into what exists for akka-actors for example.

[Dico]

Akka does not use coroutines, i.e you have to write callbacks. That makes the code style very different (and more difficult).

[Alexjok]

You can try read this Roman article https://medium.com/@elizarov/deadlocks-in-non-hierarchical-csp-e5910d137cc . It contains examples from the conference.

[pakoito]

@Dico it was more about the architecture and patterns than the syntactic sugar.

[Dico]

I mean that the architecture might have evolved differently, impacted by the significant difference in syntactic sugar. But you are right, looking at akka might provide helpful insight.