Akka Futures Exceptions

Question

What happens when an actor of a future throws an exception?

According to the Akka documentation at http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/scala/futures.html:

Answer 1

For actors you need to catch the exception and return it as a failure status. Right now you're not returning anything to the sender so you're getting a timeout exception:

class Worker extends Actor {
  def receive = {
    case i: Int => {
      try {
        throw new RuntimeException
        sender ! "Some good result"
      } catch {
        case e: Exception =>
          sender ! akka.actor.Status.Failure(e) // Alert the sender of the failure
          throw e // Alert any supervisor actor of the failure
      }
    }
  }
}

Futures can handle this a little more gracefully since they always send a result, while actors do not (this would give you the same result as above):

  val future = Future {
    throw new RuntimeException
  }