QB-Core: Key Features & Capabilities

A summary of the core features provided by the QB Actor Engine for concurrent C++ development.

QB-Core: Key Features & Capabilities

qb-core equips developers with a powerful set of features to build robust and scalable actor-based applications on top of the qb-io asynchronous foundation. Here's a rundown of its main capabilities:

I. Actor Lifecycle & Management

• Core Actor Abstraction (qb::Actor): The fundamental base class for all user-defined actors, encapsulating state and behavior.
• Flexible Actor Creation:
  • System-Wide: qb::Main::addActor<MyActor>(core_id, ...) to assign actors to specific VirtualCore threads during setup.
  • Per-Core Builder: qb::Main::core(core_id).builder().addActor<MyActor>(...) for fluent addition of multiple actors to a core.
  • Referenced (Child) Actors: qb::Actor::addRefActor<MyChildActor>(...) to create and directly reference child actors residing on the same core as the parent.
• Unique Actor Identification (qb::ActorId): Each actor receives a system-unique ID (composed of CoreId and ServiceId) for addressing messages.
• Controlled Initialization (virtual bool onInit()): A dedicated virtual method called after an actor is constructed and its ID is assigned. This is the designated place for:
  • Registering event handlers (registerEvent<MyEvent>(*this)).
  • Acquiring resources.
  • Returning false from onInit() aborts the actor's startup and leads to its destruction.
• Graceful Termination (kill()): A method for actors to request their own shutdown or for other actors/systems to request an actor's termination.
• Guaranteed Destruction (virtual ~Actor()): The actor's destructor is called only after it has fully terminated and been removed from its VirtualCore, ensuring proper RAII-based resource cleanup.
• Liveness Check (is_alive()): Allows querying if an actor is still active and processing events.

II. Event System & Asynchronous Messaging

• Event Definition (qb::Event): The base class for all inter-actor messages. Events are primarily data carriers.
• Type-Safe Dispatch: The framework uses internal type identifiers (qb::type_id) derived from event class types to ensure messages are routed to correctly typed on(EventType&) handlers.
• Event Subscription:
  • registerEvent<MyEvent>(*this): Subscribes an actor to handle a specific event type.
  • unregisterEvent<MyEvent>(*this): Dynamically unsubscribes from an event type.
• Event Handling Methods (on(const EventType&) or on(EventType&)): User-defined public methods that implement the logic for processing specific incoming events.
• Versatile Message Sending Patterns:
  • push<MyEvent>(dest, ...): The default and recommended method for sending events. Guarantees ordered delivery (relative to other push calls from the same source to the same destination) and handles non-trivially destructible event types.
  • send<MyEvent>(dest, ...): An unordered, potentially lower-latency option for same-core communication. Requires MyEvent to be trivially destructible. Use with caution.
  • broadcast<MyEvent>(...): Sends an event to all actors on all active VirtualCores.
  • push<MyEvent>(qb::BroadcastId(core_id), ...): Sends an event to all actors on a specific VirtualCore.
  • reply(Event& original_event): Efficiently sends the original_event (potentially modified) back to its source. Requires the on() handler to take a non-const event reference.
  • forward(ActorId new_dest, Event& original_event): Efficiently redirects the original_event to a new_dest, preserving the original source. Requires a non-const event reference.
• Optimized Sending Utilities:
  • to(destination_id).push<MyEvent>(...): An EventBuilder for fluently chaining multiple push calls to the same destination, avoiding repeated pipe lookups.
  • getPipe(destination_id): Provides direct access to the underlying qb::Pipe communication channel.
  • pipe.allocated_push<MyLargeEvent>(payload_size_hint, ...): Pre-allocates buffer space in the pipe for large events, preventing reallocations.

III. Concurrency, Parallelism & Scheduling

• Engine Controller (qb::Main): Manages the overall actor system, including VirtualCore threads, startup, and shutdown procedures.
• Worker Threads (qb::VirtualCore): Each VirtualCore is an independent thread that executes a group of actors and runs its own qb-io event loop (qb::io::async::listener).
• Multi-Core Execution: Actors are distributed across VirtualCores, enabling true parallel processing on multi-core CPUs.
• Transparent Inter-Core Communication: Messages between actors on different cores are routed efficiently and transparently using lock-free MPSC (Multiple-Producer, Single-Consumer) queues.
• **Configuration & Tuning (CoreInitializer via qb::Main::core(id)):
  • setAffinity(CoreIdSet): Allows pinning VirtualCore threads to specific physical CPU cores for performance optimization (e.g., improving cache locality).
  • setLatency(nanoseconds): Controls the idle behavior of a VirtualCore's event loop, balancing responsiveness against CPU usage.

IV. Actor Patterns & Utilities

• Periodic Tasks (qb::ICallback): An interface enabling actors to implement an onCallback() method that gets executed on each iteration of their VirtualCore's loop. Managed via actor.registerCallback(*this) and actor.unregisterCallback().
• Service Actors (qb::ServiceActor<Tag>): A base class for creating singleton actors per VirtualCore. These are identified by a unique Tag struct and can be discovered via qb::Actor::getService<MyService>() (for same-core access) or qb::Actor::getServiceId<MyServiceTag>(core_id).
• Dependency Discovery (qb::Actor::require<TargetActor>()): Allows an actor to request notifications (via qb::RequireEvent) when actors of TargetActor type become available or change status. Useful for discovering services or collaborators dynamically.

These features provide a comprehensive toolkit for building complex, concurrent, and high-performance applications using the Actor Model in C++.

(Next: Explore QB-Core: Mastering qb::Actor for a deep dive into defining actors.**)