Runa — Rune Actors

Runa (short for Rune Actors) is an experimental project to build a persistent, live programming world around isolated actors written in Rune. The long-term vision combines an inspectable graphical environment with a programmatic API and a VS Code extension, all connected to the same running image.

Status

Runa is at an early prototype stage. The current repository contains a minimal Rust executable; the actor runtime, Rune integration, graphical world, and development API described in the architecture spec are planned, not yet implemented.

The first milestone is to evaluate Rune's embedding, async execution, interruptibility, and debugging capabilities before building the actor kernel.

Design goals

• Keep actor identity, mailbox, private state, behavior, and incarnation separate.
• Use message passing rather than shared mutable state for actor interaction.
• Keep behavior implementations immutable and support safe, versioned updates.
• Expose the same runtime capabilities to in-world tools and external clients.
• Be explicit about execution, delivery, and persistence guarantees.

See runa-spec-architecture.md for the full vision, architecture, roadmap, and open questions.

Getting started

You need a Rust toolchain that supports the workspace's Rust 2024 edition.

Run the current executable from the repository root:

cargo run -p runa

At this stage, it prints Hello, world!.

Project structure

.
├── Cargo.toml
├── crates/
│   └── runa/
│       └── src/main.rs
└── runa-spec-architecture.md