Theta

A robust async actor framework for Rust with supervision and fault tolerance

Theta provides an actor model implementation, designed for building resilient and high performance concurrent systems. The framework emphasizes the "let it crash" philosophy on top of as small as possible code for reasoning.

Features

Async-first design - Native integration with Tokio's async runtime
Supervision trees - Panics are contained and handled gracefully through supervision hierarchy
Efficient messaging - High-performance message passing between actors

Installation

cargo add theta

Architecture

Theta implements the actor model with the following core principles:

Actors are essentially a sigle tokio task with two mpsc channels
ActorRef is an address of an actor to send messages
Supervision tree provides a hierarchy of actors for managing failures

Core Components

Actor Trait

initialize() - Actor initialization with provided arguments
process_msg() - Message processing with panic safety
supervise() - Supervision strategy for child actor failures
on_restart() - Pre-restart cleanup and preparation
on_exit() - Final cleanup on actor termination

Supervision Model

Panic of an actor escalates to its parent supervisor
Parent decides how to handle the failure for the failed actor and the rest of the children

License