Create a Rust actor library

[brson]

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.

See also: 3573

[donbrowne]

Hi there, I'd be interested in working on this project as part of a dissertation, should I drop you (and/or anyone else) a mail about this?

[brson]

I don't think that now is the time for this project. There's too much churn going on in the Rust runtime and there are going to be several interns working on Rust concurrency issues through the summer.

[ysangkok]

@brson Do you think the Rust runtime is stable enough now?

[Yoric]

Actually, there are now several actor libraries for Rust, so I'd keep this issue closed.

[ysangkok]

@Yoric are you talking about these two?

• https://github.com/kolloch/actors
• https://github.com/mnussbaum/washed_up

[Yoric]

Yes, these two and https://github.com/jonathandturner/actress