actix VS specs

9. Actix

I think it's fairer to say the language got so much more powerful that there wasn't any point making actors a language feature when they can be built from existing orthogonal language features. You're probably looking for actix (not actix-web, just actix). There's also Lunatic built in Rust but supporting any actors compiled to WebAssembly.

Actix is an actor framework for developing concurrent applications built on top of the Tokio asynchronous runtime. It allows multiple actors to run on a single thread, but also allows actors to run on multiple threads via Arbiters. Actors can communicate with each other by sequentially exchanging typed messages.

I’ve seen frameworks for c++ (https://seastar.io/) and rust (https://github.com/actix/actix) which support what you’re describing out of the box.

The actix repository on github doesn't seem to be very active, and everyone seems to be focused on actix-web instead, is anyone out there using plain actix or any other actor-model implementation in Rust?

Rust is also another possibility: it's basically C++ but more modern with added features and safety. It can be tricky to write mathematical stuff in it, because you may not care too much about all the safety concerns Rust forces you to handle, but it can be useful to catch bugs ahead of times. Sadly, Rust seems to have no library for running programs on clusters of PCs, except maybe this one, which takes the Actor model implemented by Actix and runs it on a cluster. I don't know how tricky it is to use the Actor model for a scientific simulation, tho.

I'd just use Actix for that. Make your state an actor and make it a StreamHandler for each of these sources, and that's it - now you just implement the business logic for handling each message in the StreamHandler::handle methods.

However, this isn't even 50% of what's out there: Need raw parallel power (and maybe don't need an async runtime)? Checkout Rayon. Need simple Actors for concurrent processing? Checkout Actix. Need a larger Actor system for fault tolerance/CQRS messaging? Checkout Riker. Damn, I sound like a youtube advert 🤦 - For real though, this is the tip of the concurrency iceberg. There is so much more - and it's growing.

The question arises from seeing a plethora of projects using ECS: hecs , Bevy , specs, legion

Instead, I'm using now the specs Library. It's a pure ECS library and much less powerful, without any visualization capabilities, but its works for me :)

writing an ECS is defined a challenging project, no matter the language or if you're a beginner. although it is entirely possible to write one in Rust, check out specs and bevy_ecs for examples.

specs

The official 3d rendering client uses a custom engine called Voxygen. They use Specs for logic.

Rust has a delightful ECS library, specs, that I absolutely love. It has safe multi-threaded execution built right in, which is fantastic for the pretty parallelizable work I was doing. Concurrency in C++ is nasty business on the best of days, and I've run into so many nasty bugs with the custom system I've had to build out to fit the web's weird threading model.

Man, this Specs [0] library is so strange to me, coming from a Unity background. Is there some sort of comparison as to why one way is better than the other?

[0] https://specs.amethyst.rs/

Hi everyone - I just picked up one of my long-unfinished side project built with Rust and would like to show it to you here. It's a clone of the famous(?) Winterbells game. It's written entirely in Rust and uses OpenGL and an entity-component-system architecture ([the `specs` crate](https://crates.io/crates/specs)) (still learning), no game engine.

Wait did the person at your company write specs or something else because they weren't pleased with it? I don't know much about amethyst and vaguely know about entity component systems but I watched a talk on someone making a game with amethyst and was pretty impressed -- it looked thoroughly approachable and I do not doubt the performance is there (since the whole reason you do ECS is performance).