atomr

A native Rust runtime for actor-based concurrent and distributed systems, with first-class Python bindings. atomr gives you a single mental model — addressable units of state plus behavior, communicating by asynchronous messages — that scales from a single core to a cluster, and increasingly from a CPU to a GPU.

use atomr::prelude::*;

#[derive(Default)]
struct Greeter;

#[async_trait::async_trait]
impl Actor for Greeter {
    type Msg = String;
    async fn handle(&mut self, _ctx: &mut Context<Self>, msg: String) {
        println!("hi {msg}");
    }
}

Why an actor runtime, in Rust, now

The actor model is the same idea wherever it runs: a small, addressable unit of state plus behavior, talking to other actors by asynchronous message passing. That model is a good fit for two converging trends.

Agentic systems. Long-lived, autonomous, collaborating processes that reason, call tools, and coordinate are exactly what supervised, addressable actors describe. Each agent is an actor; conversations are mailboxes; tool calls are typed messages; failure is supervised, not silently swallowed. atomr gives that model a runtime that doesn't trade performance for safety.

Unified compute. Modern workloads no longer live entirely on the CPU. Inference, embedding, scoring, simulation — they want a GPU. Coordination, control flow, I/O, persistence — they want a CPU. Today's stacks force you to glue the two with ad-hoc batching layers, queues, and serialization boundaries. The actor model already encodes the right boundary: a message is the dispatch unit. atomr is built so that the same actor_ref.tell(msg) can target a CPU mailbox today and a CUDA-backed dispatcher tomorrow — with the same supervision, the same backpressure, the same observability. The runtime is explicit about where work runs without forcing the developer to write two programs.

Granular efficiency. Rust gives us deterministic resource use, zero-cost abstractions, and ownership-as-concurrency-safety. Per-message cost stays low. Per-actor footprint stays small. The scheduler can hand work to a tokio worker, a dedicated dispatcher, or — by design — a GPU stream, without changing the message contract. That same precision lets the runtime push backpressure, mailboxes, and supervision down to a level where they don't need to be rebuilt at every layer above.

A longer argument is in docs/actors-and-agentic-computing.md.

What's in the box

Plus a Python facade — pip install atomr — that exposes the same actor model with GIL-isolated interpreter pools for CPU-bound work and async-native tell / ask.

Test coverage

atomr ships ~545 lib tests plus ~420 integration tests across the workspace. Subsystem coverage includes:

• Cluster. Vector clock, member ordering, reachability, cluster events, gossip, SBR strategies, heartbeat, membership state, plus a LeaderHandover watcher and a multinode harness.
• Cluster tools / sharding. Singleton, ClusterClient, distributed PubSub, shard allocation + handoff, at-least-once-delivery.
• Distributed data. OrMap / LWWMap / PNCounterMap / ORMultiMap, CRDT laws, replicator subscribe, three-node convergence suites, redb-backed durable store (atomr-distributed-data-lmdb).
• Persistence. PersistentFSM, EventSourced, ALOD, snapshot retention, plus the TCK's journal_replay_edge_cases and snapshot_extended_suite exercised against every backend (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Azurite, redb) in CI.
• Streams. FlowOperator, Hub, SubStream, Recovery, conflate / expand, merge_sorted / merge_prioritized, Queue / Restart.
• Core runtime. Scheduler, Stash, Extensions, Lifecycle, IO managers (TcpManager outbound Connect + IO coverage), ActorPath / Address, FailureDetector, EndpointState, Routing.
• Hosting / DI / lease. ServiceContainer, Hosting builder, Lease.
• Out-of-process multinode. MultiNodeOopController and MultiNodeOopNode drive cross-process scenarios from the testkit.

Quick start (Rust)

The umbrella crate is published on crates.io as atomr:

[dependencies]
atomr = { version = "0.1", features = ["cluster", "persistence"] }

Or pull in subsystem crates directly — atomr-core, atomr-cluster, atomr-persistence, atomr-streams, etc. are all on crates.io.

use atomr::prelude::*;

#[derive(Default)]
struct Greeter;

#[async_trait::async_trait]
impl Actor for Greeter {
    type Msg = String;
    async fn handle(&mut self, _ctx: &mut Context<Self>, msg: String) {
        println!("hi {msg}");
    }
}

# async fn run() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
let system = ActorSystem::create("S", Config::empty()).await?;
let greeter = system.actor_of(Props::create(Greeter::default), "greeter")?;
greeter.tell("world".to_string());
system.terminate().await;
# Ok(()) }

Quick start (Python)

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install atomr

from atomr import Actor, ActorSystem, props

class Greeter(Actor):
    async def handle(self, ctx, msg):
        return f"hello, {msg}"

system = ActorSystem.create_blocking("app")
ref = system.actor_of(props(Greeter), "greeter")
print(ref.ask_blocking("world", timeout=5.0))   # -> "hello, world"
system.terminate_blocking()

See docs/python.md for the GIL-strategy guide (python-pinned, python-subinterpreter-pool per PEP 684, python-nogil per PEP 703, python-subprocess) and the C-extension compatibility registry.

Building from source

# Rust
cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace

# Python bindings (requires maturin + a Python dev toolchain)
maturin develop --release
pytest python/tests -v

# Docs (optional)
pip install mkdocs-material
mkdocs serve

Profiling

atomr ships with a cross-runtime profiler that measures the same four scenarios (tell, ask, fanout, cpu) in Rust and Python and emits a shared JSON schema so the two paths can be compared directly.

cargo run --release -p atomr-profiler -- --scenario all --format md
python -m atomr.profiler --scenario all --format md

See docs/profiler.md.

Layout

crates/                 Rust workspace
crates/py-bindings/     PyO3 bridge crates
python/atomr/           Python package
python/tests/           Python integration tests
examples/               Runnable Rust examples
benches/                Criterion benches
scripts/                Cross-runtime tooling
docs/                   mkdocs-material source
xtask/                  Cargo xtask (audit, profile, bump, verify)

Learn more

• docs/actors-and-agentic-computing.md — the case for actors as the substrate for agentic + heterogeneous compute.
• docs/architecture.md — runtime structure.
• docs/idiomatic-rust.md — design choices.
• docs/python.md — Python bindings + GIL strategies.
• docs/remoting.md — cross-process actor remoting.
• docs/persistence-providers.md — storage adapters.
• docs/dashboard.md — live system UI.
• docs/observability.md — tracing + metrics exporters.
• docs/profiler.md — cross-runtime profiler.
• docs/alignment-ledger.md — crate-by-crate alignment of the runtime surface.
• docs/depth-roadmap.md — depth roadmap.