About

ractor tries to solve the problem of building and maintaining an Erlang-like actor framework in Rust. It gives a set of generic primitives and helps automate the supervision tree and management of our actors along with the traditional actor message processing logic. It’s built heavily on tokio which is a hard requirement for ractor (today).

ractor is a modern actor framework written in 100% rust with no additional unsafe code.

Additionally ractor has a companion library, ractor_cluster which is needed for ractor to be deployed in a distributed (cluster-like) scenario. ractor_cluster shouldn’t be considered production ready, but it is relatively stable and we’d love your feedback!

Why ractor?

There are other actor frameworks written in Rust (Actix, riker, or just actors in Tokio) plus a bunch of others like this list compiled on this Reddit post.

Ractor tries to be different by modelling more on a pure Erlang gen_server. This means that each actor can also simply be a supervisor to other actors with no additional cost (simply link them together!). Additionally we’re aiming to maintain close logic with Erlang’s patterns, as they work quite well and are well utilized in the industry.

Additionally we wrote ractor without building on some kind of “Runtime” or “System” which needs to be spawned. Actors can be run independently, in conjunction with other basic tokio runtimes with little additional overhead.

We currently have full support for:

1. Sequential message processing
2. Actor supervision tree
3. Remote procedure calls to actors in the rpc module
4. Timers in the time module
5. Named actor registry (registry module) from Erlang’s Registered processes
6. Process groups (ractor::pg module) from Erlang’s pg module
7. Preliminary support for distributed actors in a cluster format.