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.

Installation

[dependencies]
acktor-ipc = "1.0"

acktor-ipc already depends on acktor with the ipc feature enabled.

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 examples/pingpong for a complete client/server walkthrough using the WebSocket transport.

Feature Flags

Defaults: derive.

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

License

This project is licensed under MIT.