rakka

A native Rust runtime for actor-based concurrent and distributed systems, with first-class Python bindings. rakka gives you a single mental model — addressable units of state plus behavior, communicating by asynchronous messages — that scales from a single core to a cluster, and increasingly from a CPU to a GPU.

use rakka::prelude::*;

#[derive(Default)]
struct Greeter;

#[async_trait::async_trait]
impl Actor for Greeter {
    type Msg = String;
    async fn handle(&mut self, _ctx: &mut Context<Self>, msg: String) {
        println!("hi {msg}");
    }
}

Why an actor runtime, in Rust, now

The actor model is the same idea wherever it runs: a small, addressable unit of state plus behavior, talking to other actors by asynchronous message passing. That model is a good fit for two converging trends.

Agentic systems. Long-lived, autonomous, collaborating processes that reason, call tools, and coordinate are exactly what supervised, addressable actors describe. Each agent is an actor; conversations are mailboxes; tool calls are typed messages; failure is supervised, not silently swallowed. rakka gives that model a runtime that doesn't trade performance for safety.

Unified compute. Modern workloads no longer live entirely on the CPU. Inference, embedding, scoring, simulation — they want a GPU. Coordination, control flow, I/O, persistence — they want a CPU. Today's stacks force you to glue the two with ad-hoc batching layers, queues, and serialization boundaries. The actor model already encodes the right boundary: a message is the dispatch unit. rakka is built so that the same actor_ref.tell(msg) can target a CPU mailbox today and a CUDA-backed dispatcher tomorrow — with the same supervision, the same backpressure, the same observability. The runtime is explicit about where work runs without forcing the developer to write two programs.

Granular efficiency. Rust gives us deterministic resource use, zero-cost abstractions, and ownership-as-concurrency-safety. Per-message cost stays low. Per-actor footprint stays small. The scheduler can hand work to a tokio worker, a dedicated dispatcher, or — by design — a GPU stream, without changing the message contract. That same precision lets the runtime push backpressure, mailboxes, and supervision down to a level where they don't need to be rebuilt at every layer above.

A longer argument is in docs/actors-and-agentic-computing.md.

What's in the box

Crate	What it does
rakka	Umbrella facade re-exporting the core types
rakka-core	Actors, supervision, dispatch, mailboxes, FSMs, event stream, coordinated shutdown
rakka-config	HOCON-style layered configuration
rakka-macros	Ergonomic derives and helpers
rakka-testkit	Probes, virtual time, deterministic test scaffolding
rakka-remote	Location-transparent messaging across processes (TCP + framed PDU + reliable delivery)
rakka-cluster	Membership, gossip, reachability, split-brain resolution
rakka-cluster-tools	Singleton, pub/sub, cluster-client patterns
rakka-cluster-sharding	Shard regions, rebalance, remember-entities, persistent coordinator
rakka-cluster-metrics	Adaptive load balancing
rakka-distributed-data	Convergent replicated data types (CRDTs) over the cluster
rakka-persistence	Event sourcing — journals, snapshots, recovery, async snapshotting
rakka-persistence-query	Tagged event streams over journals
rakka-persistence-{sql,redis,mongodb,cassandra,aws,azure}	Storage adapters
rakka-persistence-tck	Conformance suite for journal + snapshot implementations
rakka-streams	Typed reactive streams (sources, flows, sinks, junctions, hubs, kill switches)
rakka-coordination	Lease-based leadership primitives
rakka-discovery	Pluggable service discovery
rakka-di	Dependency-injection container
rakka-hosting	Builder API for wiring system + config + DI together
rakka-telemetry	Tracing, metrics, exporters
rakka-dashboard	Live web UI over the running system

Plus a Python facade — pip install rakka — that exposes the same actor model with GIL-isolated interpreter pools for CPU-bound work and async-native tell / ask.

Quick start (Rust)

The umbrella crate is published on crates.io as rakka-rs (the short name rakka is already taken by an unrelated, dormant crate). Cargo's package alias keeps the import name rakka:

[dependencies]
rakka = { package = "rakka-rs", version = "0.2", features = ["cluster", "persistence"] }

Or pull in subsystem crates directly — rakka-core, rakka-cluster, rakka-persistence, rakka-streams, etc. are all on crates.io.

use rakka::prelude::*;

#[derive(Default)]
struct Greeter;

#[async_trait::async_trait]
impl Actor for Greeter {
    type Msg = String;
    async fn handle(&mut self, _ctx: &mut Context<Self>, msg: String) {
        println!("hi {msg}");
    }
}

# async fn run() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
let system = ActorSystem::create("S", Config::empty()).await?;
let greeter = system.actor_of(Props::create(Greeter::default), "greeter")?;
greeter.tell("world".to_string());
system.terminate().await;
# Ok(()) }

Quick start (Python)

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install rakka

from rakka import Actor, ActorSystem, props

class Greeter(Actor):
    async def handle(self, ctx, msg):
        return f"hello, {msg}"

system = ActorSystem.create_blocking("app")
ref = system.actor_of(props(Greeter), "greeter")
print(ref.ask_blocking("world", timeout=5.0))   # -> "hello, world"
system.terminate_blocking()

See docs/python.md for the GIL-strategy guide (python-pinned, python-subinterpreter-pool per PEP 684, python-nogil per PEP 703, python-subprocess) and the C-extension compatibility registry.

Building from source

# Rust
cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace

# Python bindings (requires maturin + a Python dev toolchain)
maturin develop --release
pytest python/tests -v

# Docs (optional)
pip install mkdocs-material
mkdocs serve

Profiling

rakka ships with a cross-runtime profiler that measures the same four scenarios (tell, ask, fanout, cpu) in Rust and Python and emits a shared JSON schema so the two paths can be compared directly.

cargo run --release -p rakka-profiler -- --scenario all --format md
python -m rakka.profiler --scenario all --format md

See docs/profiler.md.

Layout

crates/                 Rust workspace
crates/py-bindings/     PyO3 bridge crates
python/rakka/           Python package
python/tests/           Python integration tests
examples/               Runnable Rust examples
benches/                Criterion benches
scripts/                Cross-runtime tooling
docs/                   mkdocs-material source
xtask/                  Cargo xtask (audit, profile, bump, verify)

Learn more

• docs/actors-and-agentic-computing.md — the case for actors as the substrate for agentic + heterogeneous compute.
• docs/architecture.md — runtime structure.
• docs/idiomatic-rust.md — design choices.
• docs/python.md — Python bindings + GIL strategies.
• docs/remoting.md — cross-process actor remoting.
• docs/persistence-providers.md — storage adapters.
• docs/dashboard.md — live system UI.
• docs/observability.md — tracing + metrics exporters.
• docs/profiler.md — cross-runtime profiler.
• PORTING.md — alignment with prior-art runtimes.
• PORTING_TODO.md — depth roadmap.