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Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

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Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#11

Post by vbezhenar »

shawnz wrote: post #6

What is the difference between the actor model and object oriented programming? It seems to me like they are basically the same paradigm but with all the names changed, and some additional restrictions like all messages being async and objects only being able to process one message at a time. Why is it necessary to create a whole new paradigm just to enforce such a style?

You can run every actor in a separate thread or even in a separate machine, making the whole system highly scalable. Whether you'll consider that a new paradigm or not, is question of definitions.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#12

Post by zelly »

jamil7 wrote: post #2

Whats the state of Rust if I wanted to get into it for backend development? I've looked briefly into Rocket and liked it but didn't delve too deep, I understand Actix is one of the most mature?

I think if you want to do web dev backend with Rust (or C++ or any bare metal lang), you should do it behind a RPC framework (Thrift, gRPC) if only for security purposes. But it's also way more convenient. There's no need to have your core business logic also become entangled with a web server unless the networking minutiae is relevant. There are too many things that could go wrong on a public-facing endpoint to trust the runtime of something you are essentially rolling on your own if you use Rust, C++, C, etc.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#13

Post by Isn0gud »

shawnz wrote: post #6

What is the difference between the actor model and object oriented programming? It seems to me like they are basically the same paradigm but with all the names changed, and some additional restrictions like all messages being async and objects only being able to process one message at a time. Why is it necessary to create a whole new paradigm just to enforce such a style?

In the Actor model, all function calls are async and have no return value, between the Actors. Each Actor is single threaded (OOP) program. It provides a nice approach to deal with parallel programming.

Object oriented programming is a language feature while the Actor paradigm can be build on top of OOP to ease the mental burden of parallel programming.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#14

Post by shawnz »

vbezhenar wrote: post #11
shawnz wrote: post #6

What is the difference between the actor model and object oriented programming? It seems to me like they are basically the same paradigm but with all the names changed, and some additional restrictions like all messages being async and objects only being able to process one message at a time. Why is it necessary to create a whole new paradigm just to enforce such a style?

You can run every actor in a separate thread or even in a separate machine, making the whole system highly scalable. Whether you'll consider that a new paradigm or not, is question of definitions.

Isn't that basically the same as remote method invocation in OO systems?

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#15

Post by nicoburns »

shawnz wrote: post #14
vbezhenar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run every actor in a separate thread or even in a separate machine, making the whole system highly scalable. Whether you'll consider that a new paradigm or not, is question of definitions.

Isn't that basically the same as remote method invocation in OO systems?

It depends what you mean by OO. The Actor system is basically Smalltalk-style OO. Which is very different to Java-style OO, or JavaScript-style OO.

Most people who talk about OO, are talking about the Java style.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#16

Post by bsaul »

shawnz wrote: post #14
vbezhenar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run every actor in a separate thread or even in a separate machine, making the whole system highly scalable. Whether you'll consider that a new paradigm or not, is question of definitions.

Isn't that basically the same as remote method invocation in OO systems?

The way i see it : Object is the association of some functions with a state

Actor is the association of object with an execution thread.

So, actor = bounded (functions , state , thread) (thread in the sense of execution thread, not necesseraly an OS thread).

With this definition, actors can't "share" a thread, and so need to communicate through asynchronous message passing / function invocation.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#17

Post by zelly »

dragonsh wrote: post #10

This framework's core developer has left, probably new community took it over. Hopefully it will continue to be supported and developed. Rust still has a way to go for being a mature eco-system for doing any serious web programming work. Given the focus of Rust on systems programming, I will still be careful to consider it for anything web related. Hopefully situations like abandoning a project suddenly will not happ…

When you adopt a dependency, you should be prepared to maintain it yourself if no one else does. There's a reason open source licenses say "no warranty" in all-caps.

Sadly this seems to be lost on the npm and npm-adjacent crowd, who installs gigs of random people's personal projects for breakfast.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#18

Post by edejong »

shawnz wrote: post #6

What is the difference between the actor model and object oriented programming? It seems to me like they are basically the same paradigm but with all the names changed, and some additional restrictions like all messages being async and objects only being able to process one message at a time. Why is it necessary to create a whole new paradigm just to enforce such a style?

Your question is interesting from the perspective that the actor model could be seen as the precursor to modern object oriented programming. Both the actor model as defined by Carl Hewitt and the early object computational models as they are defined by Alan Kay (Smalltalk) originated during the same period and are based on similar philosophies of computation.

However, on the object oriented model track, due to practical reasons, its definition descended into a single-thread dispatch system with full message delivery guarantees. Locality was dropped (due to singletons) and the distributed model was not maintained. Method dispatch systems were later added, but could be considered a kludge. This also explains the mismatch between remote systems calls (SOAP, REST, etc.) and the internal language. Ideally, these would be the same.

With our modern systems design constraints, especially given distributed systems, we need to revisit those early decisions. The Actor model is a good blueprint for our designs. It is fundamentally decentralized, locality is enforced and at-most-once message delivery is assumed. These allow us to design and implement distributed algorithms which would be hard to implement using traditional OOP methods.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#19

Post by qaq »

jamil7 wrote: post #2

Whats the state of Rust if I wanted to get into it for backend development? I've looked briefly into Rocket and liked it but didn't delve too deep, I understand Actix is one of the most mature?

It's definitely workable but async/await landed relatively recently most key libs have been updated but things can be rough on documentation side of things.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#20

Post by microtonal »

Isn0gud wrote: post #13
shawnz wrote: post #6

What is the difference between the actor model and object oriented programming? It seems to me like they are basically the same paradigm but with all the names changed, and some additional restrictions like all messages being async and objects only being able to process one message at a time. Why is it necessary to create a whole new paradigm just to enforce such a style?

In the Actor model, all function calls are async and have no return value, between the Actors. Each Actor is single threaded (OOP) program. It provides a nice approach to deal with parallel programming. Object oriented programming is a language feature while the Actor paradigm can be build on top of OOP to ease the mental burden of parallel programming.

In the Actor model, all function calls are async and have no return value, between the Actors. Each Actor is single threaded (OOP) program. It provides a nice approach to deal with parallel programming.

I guess you mean 'concurrent programming', right? I haven't seen actors used a lot for parallelism.

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