Crate acktor_ipc 

acktor-ipc

Interprocess communication for the acktor actor framework.

About

acktor-ipc lets actors in different processes talk to each other over a transport of your choice. It introduces a Node actor that owns one or more listeners and per-connection Session actors that mediate traffic.

Concepts

• Node — a long-lived actor that holds the listener(s) for inbound connections, tracks the active sessions, and owns the registry of remote-addressable / remote-spawnable actor types. Send Connect<C> to it to dial out.
• Session — a per-connection actor that wraps a single IpcConnection, routes inbound frames to the right local actor, forwards outbound messages, and correlates request/response tags.
• RemoteAddressable (re-exported from acktor) — derive on an actor (with #[message(M1, M2, ...)]) to declare the message types it can receive from other processes. Messages must implement MessageId, Encode, and Decode; their Results must implement Encode + Decode.
• RemoteSpawnable (re-exported from acktor) — implement to allow other processes to spawn this actor on this node.
• #[remote] — attribute applied to the impl Actor for ... block of a remote-addressable actor; required so the actor exposes a remote mailbox.

Example

A minimal message definition for IPC looks like:

use acktor::{Message, MessageId};
use acktor_ipc::{Decode, Encode};
use zerocopy::{FromBytes, Immutable, IntoBytes, KnownLayout};

#[derive(
    Debug, Clone, Copy,
    KnownLayout, Immutable, FromBytes, IntoBytes,
    Message, MessageId, Encode, Decode,
)]
#[codec(zerocopy)]
#[result_type(())]
#[repr(C)]
pub struct Ping {
    pub id: u64,
    pub timestamp: i64,
}

See the pingpong example in the repository for a complete client/server walkthrough using the WebSocket transport.

Feature Flags

Defaults: derive.

Feature	Purpose
derive	Re-exports the #[remote] attribute macro.
pipe	Pipe transport (Unix sockets / Windows pipes).
websocket	WebSocket transport.

Neither transport is enabled by default — enable pipe and/or websocket to pick the transports you want.

Re-exports

pub use error::NodeError;

pub use error::SessionError;

pub use ipc_method::IpcConnection;

pub use ipc_method::IpcListener;

pub use node::Node;

pub use node::NodeEvent;

pub use session::Session;

Modules

codec

Codec traits for encoding and decoding remote messages.

double_map

A map-like container supporting lookup by two independent key types.

error

Error types used by this crate.

ipc_method

Traits for Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and some pre-implemented IPC methods.

node

Node actor for managing IPC connections and sessions.

session

Per-connection session actor.

Enums

ActorRef

An actor reference which can be used to identify an actor in a node by either its index or label.

DecodeError

Error type used by Decode.

EncodeError

Error type used by Encode.

Traits

Decode

Describes how to decode a message.

DecodeContext

Context for decoding messages.

Encode

Describes how to encode a message.

EncodeContext

Context for encoding messages.

RemoteAddressable

An actor which can be reached from other processes.

RemoteSpawnable

An actor type which can be created from another process.

StableId

A trait for types that have a stable unique iidentifier.

Attribute Macros

remotederive

Attribute macro applies to the impl Actor for MyActor block, which overrides the internal method Actor::remote_mailbox to return a RemoteMailbox for a remote addressable actor.

Derive Macros

Decode

Derive the Decode trait for a message.

Encode

Derive the Encode trait for a message.

RemoteAddressable

Derive the RemoteAddressable trait for an actor.

StableId

Derive the StableId trait for a type.