On April 20th, I was invited to give a talk on RustCon Asia 2019, a fantastic local event held by Pingcap and Cryptape.

The talk is about a distributed actor system I have been developing and using for nearly half a year, codenamed as UPS. We know that actix is the most famous and successful actor system in Rust ecosystem. UPS is different as it is a distribution-first solution. It picks fast codes for message se/de, integrates with tokio for networking. For each runtime worker, the actors are stored as plain objects, following the ECS pattern, which means UPS allows more than one actor per-type.

UPS is developed for large work loads, distributed and streaming computation. I am planning to opensource this crate this year, under the name of my company, Alibaba inc.

Enough intro, back to the talk. It’s about some problems I encountered when making this crate. Specifically, the talk is about 3 problems:

• Get compilation-stable TypeId, quite hacky
• Use specialization for different codecs
• The tick based design in UPS