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by JW_00000 594 days ago
Their presentation [1] contains a few slides with the motivation for this framework (they have existing Thrift services in C++ and Python, and want to start using Rust too) and why actors (answer: they scale better than a naive solution?). Also a slide "why a new framework" when so many already exist for Rust. (Answer: many are dead/unsupported, are too far from Erlang principles, not flexible enough, or use custom runtimes while ractor builds on Tokio.)

[1] https://slawlor.github.io/ractor/assets/rustconf2024_present...
1 comments
mtndew4brkfst 594 days ago
Tiny bit of context I'd also call out is that one of the primary authors comes from WhatsApp IIRC, with an extensive Erlang background.
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carlmr 593 days ago
If you've ever used an ML descendant you'll miss sum types wherever you go. If you've ever used Erlang you'll miss the OTP actor implementation wherever you go.
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lordofgibbons 586 days ago
I have good news for you, Gleam, built on top of Erlang, supports sum types
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snowboarder63 581 days ago
Yeah I do lol. It was the big motivation since we were writing more and more rust and missed the concurrency model. Please feel free to ping me for any further questions

It's come a long way since it started and I'm thrilled I can talk about it publicly now and it's usage at Meta (some at least lol).

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