Actor Concurrency

Auto builds concurrent systems on the Actor model, making concurrent programming safe by design.

Actor Model

Actors are independent units of computation that communicate exclusively through message passing. Each actor has:

• A private state that cannot be accessed directly from outside
• A mailbox for receiving messages
• The ability to spawn new actors

Async Types

Auto introduces the ~T type notation for asynchronous values. This makes it explicit in the type system when a value may be computed concurrently.

fn process(actor: ~Actor) -> ~Result {
    actor.send(message)
}

Safety Guarantees

• No shared mutable state between actors
• Message passing is the only communication channel
• Data races are impossible by design