Riker
Overview
Riker is a framework for building modern, concurrent and resilient systems using the Rust language. Riker aims to make working with state and behavior in concurrent systems as easy and scalable as possible. The Actor Model has been chosen to realize this because of the familiar and inherent simplicity it provides while also providing strong guarantees that are easy to reason about. The Actor Model also provides a firm foundation for resilient systems through the use of the actor hierarchy and actor supervision.
Riker provides:
- An Actor based execution runtime
- Actor supervision to isolate and recover from failures
- A modular system
- A Dispatcher backed by
futures::execution::ThreadPool
by default - Publish/Subscribe messaging via actor channels
- Message scheduling
- Out-of-the-box, configurable, non-blocking logging
- Persistent actors using Event Sourcing
- Command Query Responsiblily Separation (CQRS)
- Run futures alongside actors
Example
Cargo.toml
:
[]
= "0.1.6"
= "0.1.6"
main.rs
:
extern crate riker;
extern crate riker_default;
extern crate log;
use Duration;
use *;
use DefaultModel;
;
// implement the Actor trait
// provide factory and props methods
// start the system and create an actor
Modules
Riker's core functionality is provided by modules defined as part of a 'model'. Every application defines a Model
to describe the modules to be used. Everything from database storage, to logging, to the underlying dispatcher that executes actors is a module.
A default Model
riker-default makes it easy to get started. You can also use this default model as part of a custom model.
Associated Projects
Official crates that provide additional functionality:
- riker-cqrs: Command Query Responsibility Separation support
- riker-testkit: Tools to make testing easier
- riker-patterns: Common actor patterns, including
transform!
and 'ask'
Roadmap & Currently in Development
The next major theme on the project roadmap is clustering and location transparency:
- Remote actors
- Support for TCP and UDP
- Clustering (using vector clocks)
- Distributed data (CRDTs)
Why Riker
We believe there is no greater need than now for a full-featured actor model implementation that scales to hundreds or thousands of microservices and that equally can run exceptionally well on resource limited hardware to drive drones, IoT and robotics. The Rust language makes this possible.
Rust Version
Riker is currently built using the latest Rust Nightly. Between Riker 0.2
and 0.3
we expect to build against Rust Stable with support for specific minimum versions.
Contributing
This project is very new. There's currently no preferred contribution process. Anyone can contribute!
Places to start are open issues and modules, such as data store modules.