UsingAout.rst

Using aout -- A Concurrency-safe Wrapper for cout

When using cout from multiple actors, output often appears interleaved. Moreover, using cout from multiple actors -- and thus from multiple threads -- in parallel should be avoided regardless, since the standard does not guarantee a thread-safe implementation.

By replacing std::cout with caf::aout, actors can achieve a concurrency-safe text output. The header caf/all.hpp also defines overloads for std::endl and std::flush for aout, but does not support the full range of ostream operations (yet). Each write operation to aout sends a message to a hidden' actor. This actor only prints lines, unless output is forced using ``flush`. The example below illustrates printing of lines of text from multiple actors (in random order).

#include <random>
#include <chrono>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

#include "caf/all.hpp"
#include "caf/io/all.hpp"

using namespace caf;
using std::endl;

void caf_main(actor_system& system) {
  for (int i = 1; i <= 50; ++i) {
    system.spawn([i](blocking_actor* self) {
      aout(self) << "Hi there! This is actor nr. "
                 << i << "!" << endl;
      std::random_device rd;
      std::default_random_engine re(rd());
      std::chrono::milliseconds tout{re() % 10};
      self->delayed_send(self, tout, 42);
      self->receive(
        [i, self](int) {
          aout(self) << "Actor nr. "
                     << i << " says goodbye!" << endl;
        }
      );
    });
  }
}

CAF_MAIN()