Working with Zig / C / C++

Acton has C ABI compatibility which makes it trivial to call C functions and fairly simply to call Zig and C++ using C wrapping functions. If you want to integrate a library written in one of these languages, this page is for you.

Regardless of the foreign language used, we need to consider a few things:

• memory allocation, it must play well with the Acton GC
  • You can allocate memory via classic malloc or via Acton GC malloc
    • acton_malloc - normal malloc
    • acton_malloc_atomic for allocations that are guaranteed to not contain pointers
  • Better safe than sorry, use the GC-malloc when in doubt
  • Always use Acton GC malloc for actor and class attributes and similar
    • object and actor instances are garbage collected by the GC and there is no destructor function, so if you would have used class malloc there is no good place for the free
  • Within pure functions, you can use class malloc - be sure to free the allocations before return of the function, even for error paths
• thread safety, the Acton RTS is threaded and actors are concurrently executed by different threads
  • in general, we strive to only keep data per actor and since an actor executes sequentially, we do not need thread safety measures like locks - just make sure you don't try to share data between actors "under the hood"
  • libraries must not use global variables though
• asynchronous I/O, the Acton RTS performs asynchronous I/O and any other library that performs I/O need to conform to this model