An simple actor framework for the glommio runtime. This crate is for learning purposes only. It is heavily inspired by act-zero and Alice Ryhl's tokio actors. Honorable mention to Erlang's Actor model as well.
The key difference between glommactor and other actor frameworks is that it is intended to run within glommio, a thread-per-core runtime. Almost all of the (reasonably usable) actor crates with async support I found are not runtime agnostic; most assume tokio with a handful supporting async-std. The standout exception here is the act-zero crate, which in general is an excellent runtime-agnostic actor framework. However I found that act-zero does not support all my desired use cases. This of course is solveable, but the crate also seems to not really be maintained anymore. So I decided to build something simple to support my use cases while learning more about actors.
The main usecase I wanted to build for is allowing messaging/actor interaction across cores. So the goal is to have an actor that is pinned to a specific core, where that actor can be interacted with from a handle within tasks executing on separate cores, as well as on the actor-pinned core. This is mainly intended for command and control but could potentially also be used for data processing in limited scenarios (since this arch is intended for zero-sharing between cores).
To get some simple comparison benchmarks I implemented glommio support in a fork of the act-zero crate and have used that for the benchmarks listed below.
The OS is WSL (5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP x86_64) using cores 0, 1, 2, and 3 of a 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900K CPU:
Running benches/actors.rs (target/release/deps/actors-b03984d68620e47f)
running 2 tests
test test_actzero ... bench: 2,342,768 ns/iter (+/- 831,846)
test test_glom ... bench: 2,474,159 ns/iter (+/- 845,877)
test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 2 measured