README.md

aioerl

aioerl is a python library that mimics the philosophy of Erlang's processes with asyncio tasks.

Implements the following ideas:

• Each process has a mailbox: a queue to receive messages from other processes.
• Message passing: processes communicate entirely with messages (from the point of view of the developer)
• Supervisor/monitors: processes can monitor other processes (when a process dies or crashes, sends a message to its supervisor with the exit reason or the exception)

Why?

asyncio is awesome and built-in structures like asyncio.Queue are great for communicating between tasks but is hard to manage errors.

With aioerl, a process just waits for incoming messages from other processes and decides what to do for each event (see example).

Quickstart

Requirements: Python 3.7+

Installation:

pip install aioerl

Example

from aioerl import receive
from aioerl import reply
from aioerl import send
from aioerl import spawn

import asyncio


async def ping_pong():
    while m := await receive(timeout=10):
        if m.is_ok:
            if m.body == "ping":
                await reply("pong")
            else:
                raise Exception("Invalid message body")
        elif m.is_timeout:
            return  # terminate process


async def main():
    p = await spawn(ping_pong())

    await send(p, "ping")
    print(await receive())  # Message(sender=<Proc:Task-2>, event='ok', body='pong')

    await send(p, "pang")
    print(await receive())  # Message(sender=<Proc:Task-2>, event='err', body=Exception('Invalid message body'))

    await send(p, "ping")
    print(await receive())  # Message(sender=<Proc:Task-2>, event='exit', body='noproc')


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

TODO:

Lot of things!