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An actor-runtime equivalent of trio's "guest mode" #359

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@goodboy

Description

This is an idea that just popped up randomly when looking through some
ray examples / discussion, particularly this trio issue comment:
python-trio/trio#2135 (comment)

import ray

ray.init()

@ray.remote
def task():

    import trio  # key part, importing in remote thread!

    async def sleeper():
        await trio.sleep(1)

    trio.run(sleeper)

task.remote()

Wait wut's the idea?

Can we support an embeddable API for launching the tractor runtime
inside any thread/process spawning system which can run trio?

The short answer is intuitively yes to me, but i'm sure there's quite
a bit that might have to go into it.


Motivations:

  • bring cross-process SC to any parallel python system (including
    GIL-less python or a system that doesn't want to use tractor's
    thead/process spawning layer).
  • allow for interchange-able actor spawning functionality in a
    different-framework-based library or platform, as in this ray
    example above, or something like
    numba.nogil if they ever decided
    to support compiling async python.
  • bring parallelism to any python framework that didn't previously have
    it outside of GIL releasing extensions or threading usage.

High level API design

  • we already support open_root_actor() as the entrypoint for starting
    the runtime, though maybe we can offer some even lower level hooks for
    this.
  • we would need a way to swap out the spawning layer behind the scenes
    (dynamically) for ActorNursery.start_actor().
  • allow for doing all the ._entry._trio_main() stuff through a public
    API in any target child process such that ._runtime._async_main()
    gets called / initialized correctly.
    • this is kinda like the callbacky parts of guest mode:
          trio.lowlevel.start_guest_run(
          main,
          run_sync_soon_threadsafe=run_sync_soon_threadsafe,
          done_callback=done_callback,
          # restrict_keyboard_interrupt_to_checkpoints=True,
      )

Obviously a lot more to go into in this section ..

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