The Acton programming language

Acton is a general purpose programming language, designed to be useful for a wide range of applications, from desktop applications to embedded and distributed systems. In a first approximation Acton can be described as a seamless addition of a powerful new construct to an existing language: Acton adds actors to Python.

Acton is a compiled language, offering the speed of C but with a considerably simpler programming model. There is no explicit memory management, instead relying on garbage collection.

Acton is statically typed with an expressive type language and type inference. Type inference means you don't have to explicitly declare types of every variable but that the compiler will infer the type and performs its checks accordingly. We can have the benefits of type safety without the extra overhead involved in declaring types.

The Acton Run Time System (RTS) offers a distributed mode of operation allowing multiple computers to participate in running one logical Acton system. Actors can migrate between compute nodes for load sharing purposes and similar. The RTS offers exactly once delivery guarantees. Through checkpointing of actor states to a distributed database, the failure of individual compute nodes can be recovered by restoring actor state. Your system can run forever!

NOTE: Acton is in an experimental phase and although much of the syntax has been worked out, there may be changes.

Getting started with Acton

Install Acton

Check out the installation guide for more details.

Debian / Ubuntu

sh
1sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
2sudo wget -q -O /etc/apt/keyrings/acton.asc https://apt.acton-lang.io/acton.gpg
3sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/acton.asc
4echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/acton.asc arch=amd64] http://apt.acton-lang.io/ stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/acton.list
5sudo apt-get update
6sudo apt-get install -qy acton

Mac OS X

sh
1brew install actonlang/acton/acton

Writing and compiling your first Acton program

Edit the program source file, let's call it helloworld.act, and enter the following code:

Acton
1actor main(env):
2    print("Hello, world!")
3    env.exit(0)

Compile the program and run it:

1$ actonc helloworld.act
2$ ./helloworld
3Hello, world!

And then...?

Check out our learning resources.

Building Acton from source

See building Acton from source.

Developing Acton

See dev info.

Contributions

For information about contributing to Acton, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Thanks to all the people who already contributed!