Running Futures

Riker can execute and drive futures to completion. In fact, internally actors are executed as futures by the dispatcher. This means Riker can run any future on the same dispatcher, alongside actors.

ActorSystem and Context both have an execute method that accepts a future to run:

  1. let handle = system.execute(async move {
  2.     format!("some_val_{}", i)
  3. });
  4.  
  5. assert_eq!(block_on(handle), format!("some_val_{}", i));

sys.execute schedules the future for execution and the dispatcher will drive it to completion utilizing the dispatcher's thread pool. execute returns a futures::future::RemoteHandle future that can be used to extract the result.

Note

The default Riker dispatcher uses the Futures crate's ThreadPool to run futures.

In the next section we'll see how to to test Riker applications.