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Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

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Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#51

Post by imtringued »

dragonsh wrote: post #35
EugeneOZ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, I'm writing web backends in Rust 5 years already and didn't know it's not "viable" yet.

Yes probably viable for you as an individual, this does not collate into viable for most. It’s still a niche inside a niche. People are writing web backend in Haskell for decades, it is a viable choice for very specific niche of web development. Rust has miles to go before it can reach even that stage. At present elixir has much bigger eco-system than Rust.

I disagree. The ecosystem needed for web development doesn't need to be large. One major framework with a lot of integration focused plugins (think SSO, LDAP, SQL, Kafka, etc) should be more than enough. In the JVM ecosystem Micronaut isn't even two years old and it is already a viable choice for a lot of use cases.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#52

Post by shawnz »

dnautics wrote: post #40
Isn0gud wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I think building oop on top of actor model makes the mental model far easier. Instead of worrying if the knight object uses the sword object to hurt the monster obect then which object .deals_damage? Or should the object take_damage? The actor framework, being all message passing, makes these choices clear. True, originally oop was message passing, but no mainstream modern oop languages except Ruby sorta are…

> no mainstream modern oop languages except Ruby sorta are message passing frameworks.

Will changing the name fix that problem? I think any language or framework that gains widespread adoption will have to compromise its principles in some ways for the sake of pragmatism.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#53

Post by brucenanner »

imtringued wrote: post #49
shawnz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Although I'm not sure what you really mean by "remote method invocation", the idea of remote method invocation in OO systems should be impossible or incredibly difficult considering the semantics of a method call. Method calls are synchronous and they are not allowed to fail under any circumstance. But in the context of distributed systems you have to choose between at most once or at least once delivery which are se…

Not nearly impossible. Was put in the jdk like 20 years ago. RMI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_remote_method_invocatio...

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#54

Post by imtringued »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #9
ncmncm wrote: post #4

Can somebody please summarize the outcome of the recent kerfuffle? I don't mind which way it came out, but it seems worth knowing what it was. I absolutely don't want any even-slightly-inflammatory answer.

This is from memory, I would welcome any corrections. Actix was written with a lot of unsafe code [0], which some people considered unnecessary and potentially dangerous in a web framework. In some cases the unsafe code may have been performing better than equivalent safe code. In other cases, it was possible to rewrite with safe code without losing performance. People submitted patches to replace unsafe code with sa…

I do not understand the motivation for deleting the repository. Most maintainers just quit but they don't go out of their way to take down the project when they go.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#55

Post by Thaxll »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #30
dragonsh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At present Rust's primary focus is systems programming language, it will take another 3-5 years to be a viable web programming that too in a niche area. I doubt the libraries will be mature enough to provide easy way to build the way other languages do. If you know Ruby or Python or C# or Swift or Go language or Dart or TypeScript or JavaScript don't change to Rust yet. It's far far away from having similar library,…

Oops, I'm writing web backends in Rust 5 years already and didn't know it's not "viable" yet.

Afaik there is no mature swagger version for Rust which is a no go if you do a lot of API services.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#56

Post by shawnz »

brucenanner wrote: post #53
imtringued wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I'm not sure what you really mean by "remote method invocation", the idea of remote method invocation in OO systems should be impossible or incredibly difficult considering the semantics of a method call. Method calls are synchronous and they are not allowed to fail under any circumstance. But in the context of distributed systems you have to choose between at most once or at least once delivery which are se…

Not nearly impossible. Was put in the jdk like 20 years ago. RMI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_remote_method_invocatio...

Another example is Distributed Smalltalk from 1987

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#57

Post by mamcx »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #5
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 wouldn't call Actix the most mature, but it's definitely the one that gets talked about the most. I built a fairly complex backend directly on top of Hyper[0] (it doesn't even involve that much glue, really) in 2016 and have updated it as Rust and Hyper have matured. It's actually a delight to work on, and I brought a new hire on board recently who had no trouble getting up to speed, since everything is just straig…

> I wouldn't call Actix the most mature

Surely? I try several other for replace my .NET core project, and Actix is the only one that barely get there.

Which other handle without much fuzz:

- Auth (big!) - Routing with state and db pooling - Forms - Templates - Encode/Decode all stuff (query string, headers, etc) - Allow to inject middle-wares - Have (at least) the bare minimum of functionality like gzip encoding - And many other small details I forget now

I have worked, alot, with django, then use .net core and now Actix, and the others rust frameworks are lacking badly as far I see.

What I see the rust ecosystem is lacking now is mostly around templating (need more love for dynamic options!) and some stabilization around rdbms usage..

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#58

Post by dmm »

The naming is a little confusing here. This is Actix the actor model library, not "Actix web" the web framework that's usually discussed.

Originally "Actix web" depended on Actix the actor library, but no longer. Though they can be used together. And I think websockets still require actors?

I'm using both Actix and Actix web for a personal project. I like it a lot and think the actor model is good fit for applications that don't fit well into a request lifecycle.

My main pain point with it is the use of futures. Right now it's a huge pain to have more than one return value in an Actor Handler, the functions that handle actor messages. Even if you box the returned Future, you end up having to use futures::Either a bunch and when you mess it up you get tons of confusing errors filled with the huge inferred types.

Implementing something like:

  if (condition1) {
    return ;
  } else if (condition2) {
    return ;
  } else {
    return ;
  }
Is a big pain requiring two layers of future::Either. Or I just don't know what I'm doing, which is very possible.

async/await would be a huge improvement, but can't be used at the moment, even though the current version of Actix uses std::future's.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#59

Post by throwaway17_17 »

imtringued wrote: post #54
_-___________-_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from memory, I would welcome any corrections. Actix was written with a lot of unsafe code [0], which some people considered unnecessary and potentially dangerous in a web framework. In some cases the unsafe code may have been performing better than equivalent safe code. In other cases, it was possible to rewrite with safe code without losing performance. People submitted patches to replace unsafe code with sa…

I do not understand the motivation for deleting the repository. Most maintainers just quit but they don't go out of their way to take down the project when they go.

I think it’s basic human instinct, paraphrased by the saying ‘taking my ball and going home’. I mean if people are not treating you how you want to be treated, why should I go and leave them with my stuff.

Not saying I agree with what he did, but I do get it.

Re: Actix – Actor Framework for Rust

#60

Post by andrewzah »

Actix (the actor framework) is separate from what people are discussing here: actix-web, which supports actix). In earlier versions of actix-web it was based around actix; I remember implementing actors and handlers. Since 1.0 or so that got changed to more of a standard setup.

I’ll add my 2c on actix-web: in my opinion it tries to do too much. hyper (simply based on tokio) is all you need for a fast async server. Anecdotally, I know many people who basically use just this stack, over actix-web/warp/tower etc.

There are other actor systems, like kay [0].

[0]: https://citybound.github.io/citybound/kay/index.html

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