# acu
Utility crate for building asynchronous actors.
Before using this crate, I'd recommend to get to know of the actor pattern in Rust, [Alice Ryhl](https://ryhl.io) created a very useful [blog post](https://ryhl.io/blog/actors-with-tokio/).
## Getting started
##### Add crate to dependencies
Using [cargo-edit](https://github.com/killercup/cargo-edit)
```
cargo add acu
```
or manually...
##### Build your first Actor
```rust
use tokio::sync::oneshot;
#[derive(Debug)]
enum Message {
Increment,
Get { respond_to: oneshot::Sender<usize> },
}
struct MyActor {
receiver: acu::Receiver<Message>,
counter: usize,
}
impl MyActor {
async fn run(&mut self) {
while let Some(message) = self.receiver.recv().await {
match message {
Message::Increment => self.counter += 1,
Message::Get { respond_to } => respond_to.send(self.counter).unwrap(),
}
}
}
}
#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
struct MyActorHandle {
sender: acu::Sender<Message>,
}
impl MyActorHandle {
pub fn new() -> Self {
let (sender, receiver) = acu::channel(8, "MyActor");
let mut actor = MyActor {
receiver,
counter: 0,
};
tokio::spawn(async move { actor.run().await });
Self { sender }
}
pub async fn increment(&self) {
self.sender.notify(|| Message::Increment).await
}
pub async fn get(&self) -> usize {
self.sender
.call(|respond_to| Message::Get { respond_to })
.await
}
}
#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
let handle = MyActorHandle::new();
println!("initial counter: {}", handle.get().await);
for _ in 0..100 {
handle.increment().await;
}
println!("counter after 100 increments: {}", handle.get().await);
}
```
or if you would like to make use of logging functionality, you need to initialize `log`, for example by using [simple-log](https://lib.rs/crates/simple-log) crate:
```rust
// at the top of the main function
simple_log::quick!("debug");
```
Then each call/notify on the actor will get logged.
## Motivation
I wanted to use some structs and functions in few of my projects, including [Houseflow](https://github.com/gbaranski/houseflow). And I thought this might be useful for other projects as well.