What's your take on Coyote?

[JohnNilsson]

Microsoft recently release a new actor implementation: Coyote

So I was wondering how this relates to Reliable Actors:

What has been learnt since Orleans and Reliable Actors?

Will elements of Coyote be incorporated into Reliable Actors?

[esbenbach]

This pretty much does a comparrison with SF: https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/learn/programming-models/actors/why-actors

[JohnNilsson]

I'm hoping for something a bit more opinionated than "there have also been instances". What's the take away?

[WhitWaldo]

Updated link on the Coyote docs: https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/#concepts/actors/why-actors/

@JohnNilsson I haven't yet used Coyote, but having read through the docs this morning, both use the same single-threaded execution model, I'd say there are two large differences:

• Coyote lacks a distributed runtime, so it's an actor solution that requires hosting on some other runtime
• It appears designed entirely around a test-like-it-runs-in-production philosophy where instead treating a test suite as something run in parallel just from a speed perspective and the runtime as one run in more a concurrent real-world manner, it attempts to perform more rigorous test coverage to run that test suite in a real-world manner complete with all the concurrency bugs you might not readily encounter locally. It can produce a DGML diagram showing state transitions leading up to a bug and supports reproduction of bugs using async, await, lock, using the common System.Threading.Tasks types in the TPL including Task, Task<TResult> and TaskCompletionSource<TResult> as well as Monitor in System.Threading.

Other notes:

• C# only with a dependency only on .NET Core running atop the .NET Task Parallel Library
• Cross-platform on .NET Standard 2.0+
• Installed via NuGet package (Microsoft.Coyote or individually with Microsoft.Coyote.Core and Microsoft.Coyote.Test). They also offer a CLI tool that can be installed globally with Microsoft.Coyote.CLI (or Microsoft.Coyote.Tool for Windows-only .NET)

I'm looking forward to playing around with it atop a reliable service as it looks like it might really help from a testability perspective.