Create a Rust actor library with high-level patterns, recovery, networking, sandboxing

[steveklabnik]

Issue by brson
Monday Sep 24, 2012 at 20:46 GMT

For earlier discussion, see rust-lang/rust#3573

This issue was labelled with: A-an-interesting-project, A-concurrency, A-libs, I-wishlist, P-low in the Rust repository

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Rust has a lot of powerful concurrency tools, but they aren't packaged up into a high-level, consistent interface.

Things that would be great in an actor library:

• High-level help with implementing actor patterns, nice interface, minimal boilerplate
• Cross-process actors with sandboxing. Sandboxing is very important to Servo, which has some initial sandboxing libraries.
• Network-based messaging and actors
• Reliable failure and recovery schemes. Rust has linked task failure, but no higher-level constructs to help users make use of it for creating reliable systems ala Erlang OTP.

Take inspiration from Scala, Akka and Erlang.

This probably isn't suitable for the main repo, but would be very useful for projects like Servo.

[carllerche]

IMO this belongs in a dedicated crate and not the stdlib.

[steveklabnik]

Tagging as 'community library' for exactly that reason.

[carllerche]

I started work here: https://github.com/carllerche/astaire However, I am focusing on syncbox futures & streams at the moment. I think Futures & Streams will be a good abstraction to use with actors as well...

[victrcodes]

+1. Is this one in the right direction - https://github.com/withoutboats/Chekhov ?

[ayosec]

https://github.com/gamazeps/RobotS can be a good start

[gamazeps]

@brson @steveklabnik @ayosec yay, i'm currently working on an actor library (the one linked above) and I was wondering what kind of features would be expected.

It currently mostly works on a single machine and has recovery (except for huge failures).

The only issue is that I currently have neither users nor use cases so I don't know what are the most desired features and thus I'm kinda working in the dark.

Would you have a list of stuff that would be nice to have (pretty please) ? Because once I'm done with the networking (in a week or two I guess) I will be out of ideas :/

[simbo1905]

@gamazeps I would suggest talking a look at Akka as a mature actor framework. There is a core lib which has actors, routers, dispatchers with supervision of crashed actors to manage local work. Then there are the remote extensions to do location transparency. Then there is clustering and server life cycle to be containers to do remote deployment of actors. That's all way, way too much and very much "everyone and the kitchen sink" but it has a good core library that can give good inspiration. My personal favourite is Akka FSM (finite state machine) where you define which matching functions apply to which state then have an API to switch states (hence matching functions) for the next message. So at this link is an actor which does Multi-Paxos for distributed consensus written as a FSM actor https://github.com/trex-paxos/trex/blob/codacy-changes/core/src/main/scala/com/github/simbo1905/trex/internals/PaxosActor.scala

[gamazeps]

@simbo1905 yup, i'm quite aware of the akka library (I have read the documentation half a dozen time while implementing RobotS), this is the example / inspiration I have used this far, my question was more about which specific features in akka (or erlang, or any other actor framework) are the most desirable :)

As said before the "module", I'm gonna work next is the one for networking and location transparency.
I am wondering which next "modules" I should work on / improve, because as you said there are far too many and since I don't have a use case yet, I need to know where to prioritize my efforts :)

Thanks for the more than complete answer :)

[gsingh93]

@gamazeps That would be a great question to ask on the subreddit, or maybe the user forums. You'll find a lot more people there to discuss it.

[gamazeps]

@gsingh93 fair enough :)

[norru]

I would go straight to http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/scala/typed.html :)