The actor programming model supports the development of concurrent applications by encapsulating state and behavior into independent actors. Each actor is a computational entity with strictly private state and behavior. Actors communicate via asynchronous messaging and, in this way, require neither shared memory nor locking. This makes the actor model suitable not only for parallel programming but also for distributed applications engineering.

The Rust programming language is a statically-typed language that gained a lot of attention in the past years due to its efficient, economical and safe memory management. To ease the development of parallel applications, several actor model frameworks have been built for Rust. However, no actively maintained Rust actor framework provides the necessary features to write distributed applications. For this reason, we propose an extension for Rust’s Actix library, called Actix-Telepathy, that enables remote messaging and offers clustering support. It allows developers to setup remote actors that can communicate across a computer network with the help of a straight forward and easy to understand interface. Our evaluation demonstrates that Actix-Telepathy competes well in remote messaging performance and memory consumption with other actor libraries, such as Scala’s popular Akka library.