act-locally

Simple single-threaded async actors with ordinary functions as handlers and plainly typed messages.

Why another actor framework?

Actor frameworks in Rust are an epidemic

In that spirit, act-locally was created with two primary goals:

1. Simplicity in handler definition and message types: Use ordinary Rust functions as handlers, reducing boilerplate and making your code more intuitive. Use ordinary types as message/return types.

2. Support for !Send/!Sync state: Leverage thread-local async executors so that shared state doesn't need to be thread-safe.

These features allow for more natural Rust code within an actor model, and enable use cases that many other actor frameworks don't support out of the box.

Features

• Both synchronous and asynchronous message handlers
• Supports mutating and non-mutating handlers
• Flexible dispatcher system for message routing
• Type-safe message passing
• Built on smol for async runtime
• Integrates with tracing for observability

TODO

• Support closures as handlers
• Documentation and examples
• Offer more control over order-execution when combining mutating and non-mutating handlers (currently a write-preferring read/write lock is used)
• Stream integration
• Benchmarks and optimization

License

Licensed under MIT. See LICENSE for details.