fluxion

Distributed actor framework written in Rust.

About

Fluxion is an actor framework designed with distributed systems in mind, namely sending messages not just between actors, but also between systems.

Why Fluxion?

Fluxion is designed for a very specific usecase: creating applications that require extremely flexible plugin solutions and communication between different running instances. If you do not need any of the specific features provided by Fluxion, you are probably best off using a different actor system. Internally, Fluxion is based upon Slacktor, which provides a core actor framework and high-performance messaging solution. Slacktor was purpose built for Fluxion, and is provided separately for higher-performance usecases, as well as those that do not need Fluxion's additional features.

Core Features

Fluxion embraces a few core features, and tries to keep an API that is as as simple and extensible as possible.

No-Std Support

Fluxion and its dependencies only depend on core and alloc. This means that Fluxion can be used in no-std environments, as long as an allocator is available.

Executor Agnosticism

Fluxion is structured such that it never needs to spawn any tasks. This means that Fluxion does not need to access any specific executor library and is completely executor agnostic with no boilerplate required. You can use Tokio, async_std, Smol, or even write your own executor and Fluxion will not care. In the provided examples, however, we do use Tokio, as it is the most popular executor.

Foreign Messages

Fluxion's core feature is being able to send messages between systems, and is conditional on the foreign feature. Fluxion accomplishes this by allowing the user to define a "delegate" that responds to requests for specific foreign actors. The delegate returns an implementor of a trait that enables sending messages of a specific type. If the serde feature is enabled, then messages will be required to implement serialization functionality to be treated as foreign messages.

Getting Started

The best way to get started right now is to take a look at the simple example. It contains the most bare bones possible example for using Fluxion as an actor system with no special features. For more advanced usage, take a look at the book.

License

Fluxion is Dual-Licensed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses.