ring

A program showing rings of actors passing messages.

How to Compile

With a minimal Pony installation, in the same directory as this README file run ponyc. You should see content building the necessary packages, which ends with:

...
Generating
 Reachability
 Selector painting
 Data prototypes
 Data types
 Function prototypes
 Functions
 Descriptors
Optimising
Writing ./ring.o
Linking ./ring

How to Run

Once ring has been compiled, in the same directory as this README file run ./ring. You should see a single number printed.

$ ./ring
2

What this program is doing is setting up a ring of actors (each with an ID starting at 1), passing a set of messages, and the final actor to receive the message prints its ID.

This program has arguments which can be seen using --help.

$ ./ring --help
rings OPTIONS
  --size N number of actors in each ring
  --count N number of rings
  --pass N number of messages to pass around each ring

As stated above, --size changes the number of actors in a ring, --count changes the number of rings, and --pass changes the number of messages to pass. By default --size is 3, --count is 1, and --pass is 10.

Program Modifications

Notice something about this program: any random argument will display the "help message" such as ./ring --this-is-not-an-argument. Modify the program to use the cli package so that it has a defined --help command and rejects such random arguments.