Actix
Actor framework for Rust. Typed message passing, async and sync actors, supervision trees. Runs on Tokio.
actix-web (21k stars, the most popular Rust web framework) is built on top, but the actor core is a separate crate. You can use actors without the web framework.
When to use
- Isolated concurrent state (one actor per entity: user, order, session)
- Typed message passing between components (no
Anytype) - Supervision trees for fault tolerance
- Background workers with lifecycle management
Alternatives
| Crate | Stars | Distributed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| actix | 9.2k | No | Battle-tested, less active since 2024 |
| kameo | 1.2k | Yes (libp2p DHT) | Built-in distributed messaging |
| ractor | 2k | Experimental | Erlang-inspired, supervision trees |