ghost_actor

A simple, ergonomic, idiomatic, macro for generating the boilerplate to use rust futures tasks in a concurrent actor style.

What is GhostActor?

GhostActor boils down to a macro that helps you write all the boilerplate needed to treat a Future like an actor. When you "spawn" a GhostActor, you receive a handle called a "Sender", that allows you to make async requests and inline await async responses to/from you actor implementation's driver task.

The senders are cheaply clone-able allowing you to easily execute any number of parallel workflows with your task. When all senders are dropped, or if you explicitly call ghost_actor_shutdown(), the driver task (a.k.a. your Actor) will end.

Example

``rust ghost_actor::ghost_actor! { // set the visibility of your actor -()` for private. Visibility(pub),

// name your actor
Name(MyActor),

// any custom error set here must implement `From<GhostError>`
Error(MyError),

// specify your actor api
Api {
    // Method names will be transformed into snake_case,
    // so, this method will be called "add_one".
    AddOne(
        // this string will be applied as docs to sender/handler
        "A test function, output adds 1 to input.",

        // the input type for your api
        u32,

        // the output type for your api
        u32,
    ),
}

}

/// An example implementation of the example MyActor GhostActor. struct MyActorImpl;

impl MyActorHandler<(), ()> for MyActorImpl { fn handleaddone( &mut self, input: u32, ) -> MyActorHandlerResult { Ok(async move { Ok(input + 1) }.boxed().into()) } }

impl MyActorImpl { /// Rather than using ghostactorspawn directly, use this simple spawn. pub async fn spawn() -> MyActorSender { use futures::future::FutureExt;

    let (sender, driver) = MyActorSender::ghost_actor_spawn(Box::new(|_| {
        async move {
            Ok(MyActorImpl)
        }.boxed().into()
    })).await.unwrap();

    tokio::task::spawn(driver);

    sender
}

}

[tokio::main(threaded_scheduler)]

async fn main() { let mut sender = MyActorImpl::spawn().await;

assert_eq!(43, sender.add_one(42).await.unwrap());

sender.ghost_actor_shutdown().await.unwrap();

assert_eq!(
    "Err(GhostError(SendError(SendError { kind: Disconnected })))",
    &format!("{:?}", sender.add_one(42).await),
);

} ```