Using Futures in Akka Actors

Question

I'm just starting to learn Akka Actors in Scala. My understanding is that messages received by an Actor are queued in an Actor's mailbox, and processed one at a time. By processing messages one at a time, concurrency issues (race conditions, deadlocks) are mitigated.

But what happens if the Actor creates a future to do the work associated with a message? Since the future is async, the Actor could begin processing the next several messages while the future associated with the prior message is still running. Wouldn't this potentially create race conditions? How can one safely use futures within an Actor's receive() method to do long running tasks?

Answer 1

The safest way to use futures within an actor is to only ever use pipeTo on the future and send its result as a message to an actor (possibly the same actor).

import akka.pattern.pipe

object MyActor {

  def doItAsynchronously(implicit ec: ExecutionContext): Future[DoItResult] = { 
  /* ... */ 
  }

}

class MyActor extends Actor {

  import MyActor._    
  import context.dispatcher  

  def receive = {
    case DoIt =>
      doItAsynchronously.pipeTo(self)
    case DoItResult =>
       // Got a result from doing it
  }

}

This ensures that you won't mutate any state within the actor.