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:

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.
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