Why was actix_web_actors deprecated in favour of actix-ws?

[LucaCappelletti94]

Hi all,

I see that actix_web_actors has been deprecated in favor of actix-ws, which has the apparent benefit of not having Actors.

From what I understand, deprecated implies that actix_web_actors will no longer be maintained, and that new development should ideally move to actix-ws.

In my current use case, I have a actix_web_actors-based websocket Actor, which contains attributes such as a diesel-async connection AsyncPgConnection, which is used both for DB queries and for the Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY. These PgNotify notifications are then sent to the actor via address.do_send, where I get the address from the Actor context using .address().

Such a AsyncPgConnection connection cannot be sent across threads, and therefore I am quite unsure regarding how to refactor this Actor-based code into an actor-less one. Different AsyncPgConnection connections would have a different set of listening channels, so I cannot just reconnect inside of the thread.

After trying (and admittedly struggling) to understand the chat-actorless example I am left puzzled.
The actor-less model seems to cater to simpler scenarios, and implementing more advanced behavior appears more complex than with actors.

Could you clarify the motivation behind deprecating actix_web_actors? What are the benefits of the new model—performance, scalability, maintainability, resource usage? Do you have other examples than the chat-actorless which may include a DB connection?

Thanks in advance for your time and insights, and have a great day!

Best,
Luca

[robjtede]

The actix actor system is very outdated and is soft-deprecated since there's no one on the current team interested in developing it any more. Therefore, the pieces of Actix Web that rely on it needed proper alternatives first. The actix-ws crate fits much better in today's async-first Rust, something that anything based on actix fails to do.

For new projects, I will advise those intersted in using the actor model to use the Actors with Tokio pattern or use one of the async-native actor frameworks such as ractor. Our actor-based WebSocket echo example was converted to use ractor.