xtra

A tiny (<1k LOC) actor framework. It is modelled around Actix. It's probably best to not use this production.

Features

• Asynchronous and synchronous responders
• Simple asynchronous message handling interface which allows async/await syntax (no more ActorFuture - asynchronous responders just return impl Future)
• Does not depend on its own runtime and can be run with any futures executor (Tokio and async-std have the Actor::spawn convenience method implemented out of the box).
• Quite fast (<200ns time from sending a message to it being processed for sending without waiting for a result)

To do

• Thread-local actors that are !Send
• Documentation
• Actor notifications (sending messages to self) and creating an address from the actor's context
• Scheduling of repeated-at-interval and time-delayed messages for actors

Limitations

The main limitation of this crate is that it extensively uses unstable features. For example, to get rid of ActorFuture, Generic Associated Types (GATs) must be used. This is an incomplete and unstable feature, which appears to be a way off from stabilisation. It also uses impl Trait Type Aliases to avoid Boxing the futures returned from the AsyncHandler trait (the library, however, is not alloc-free). This means that it requires nightly to use, and may be unstable.