Thursday, July 26, 2012

libcppa on Mountain Lion

I have just upgraded my Mac and I have good news for all Apple users out there!

If you have switched to Mountain Lion or have plans to do so, you will find clang++ in version 4.0 after installing XCode. Hence, there is finally no need to get a recent compiler from an external source. libcppa 0.3 compiles and runs like a charm after installing CMake and Boost from MacPorts.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Version 0.3 Released

I'm glad to announce libcppa 0.3. This release has two major improvements.

Synchronous Messages

Actors can send synchronous response messages by using the function sync_send. This function returns a future to the response that can be received by using either the blocking receive_response or the event-based handle_response. Please read the section about synchronous communication in the manual for further details.

Configure Script

Thanks to Matthias Vallentin (a.k.a. mavam), libcppa has a much simpler build process now. The new configure script hides all CMake details behind a nice and clean interface.

Minor Improvements

  • Context-switching can be disabled by using the --disable-context-switching configure option for platforms without Boost.Context support (Issue 24).
  • The function tuple_cast does no longer require an additional header include (Issue 38).
  • The new "cppa_fwd.hpp" header provides forward declarations for heavily used data structures, such as actor_ptr (Issue 36).
  • become() no longer accepts pointers to avoid potential misuses and resulting memory leaks.