Actix and long-running future-based tasks

What is the preferred way to run pollable futures on the Actix runtime? Should I implement Future for some type, and thereafter, use Arbiter::spawn() thereon?

Consider creating an Actor for long running async tasks in Actix. Sending messages to the Actor will allow it to perform useful work, and it will respond asynchronously as results become available.

But yes, Arbiter::spawn() is a good way to spawn actors on the System.

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Thank you.

Suppose I have an async closure as such

async fn long_task() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    download_web_page().await // this will take time
}

How do I execute this from the context of an actor?

It's sort of a bummer that we can't use .await inside the handle, starting, stopping, and other functions associated with Actor's and Handlers

Yes, Actix predates async/await support in Rust by about 2 years. The consequence of this is that the Actix ecosystem doesn't really play nicely with it. There have been some recent improvements with the release of 0.9.0...

However, it seems like I may have misunderstood what you meant by "run pollable futures" ... (All futures can be polled.) If you just want to write plain old async functions (meaning you don't necessarily need a long-lived service), you can hide all of the actor boilerplate and just use actix-rt as an async runtime.

One example worth pointing out is async_ex1, which uses actix-web to provide an HTTP server, and async function to make HTTP requests to httpbin.

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But, as of now, the actor model is not compatible with async/await. Hmm, sounds like a good project that would be very fruitful.

I do need to keep a session alive and reactive to requests using websockets. The actors respond to websocket inbound packets in my setup.

You can look into some example actor implementations, like actix_redis::RedisActor. It's all futures compositions, as you might imagine. No async functions or await keywords in sight!

(The higher-level RedisSession internals does have this sugar, though.)

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