lapinbeam

Real-time distributed systems framework for Python with a Rust core. An actor model inspired by Erlang/Elixir (BEAM), built with Rust (Tokio) exposed through PyO3.

Repository: https://github.com/rroblf01/lapinbeam · Docs: https://rroblf01.github.io/lapinbeam/ · Changelog

Status

1.2.0 — the public API (Node, Supervisor, actor/on, ActorRef/ RemoteRef, codec) is stable; a breaking change now requires a major version bump. This hasn't been run at production scale yet — see Limitations below for what it deliberately doesn't do.

Features

• @actor decorated Python classes with async def receive(msg), or typed dispatch via @on(Type) / @on(default=True) (see below).
• Supervisor with restart strategies (one_for_one, one_for_all, rest_for_one).
• Node with transparent remote actor references.
• Multiplexed TCP transport (one socket per peer) with bincode serialization.
• Heartbeat and connection watchdog in the Rust core.
• Automatic reconnection of desired peers with backoff.
• Type-preserving payloads: @dataclass and Pydantic v2 models round-trip between nodes via lapinbeam.codec.
• ask() request/response on top of fire-and-forget send(), and on_event() for connection/delivery/supervisor observability.
• Optional shared-secret handshake authentication (cluster_secret).
• Lightweight seed-node discovery (register_discovery/join_via_seeds) — a node needs one already-running node's address, not every node's.
• Nested supervision trees: Supervisor.spawn_supervisor() lets a Supervisor supervise another Supervisor.
• Bidirectional links (link/unlink/trap_exit) and one-way, non-lethal monitors (monitor/demonitor), local and cross-node, with no wire protocol changes for either.
• Cluster-wide named process groups (join_group/leave_group/members) and cluster-wide unique name registration (register_name/ unregister_name/whereis_name), local and cross-node, with no wire protocol changes for either.

Install

pip install lapinbeam

The wheel is built for abi3 >= 3.11, so a single artifact covers Python 3.11 through 3.14.

Quickstart (two nodes)

# terminal 1
NODE_NAME=node_a@127.0.0.1:9001 PEER=node_b@127.0.0.1:9002 uv run python examples/app_node_a.py
# terminal 2
NODE_NAME=node_b@127.0.0.1:9002 PEER=node_a@127.0.0.1:9001 uv run python examples/app_node_b.py

Or with Docker (validated end-to-end: 100/100 ACKs inside the compose network):

docker compose up --build

Typed message dispatch

By default an actor implements a single async def receive(self, msg). As an alternative, use @on(Type) to dispatch by the message's real type — which lapinbeam.codec already preserves for @dataclass/Pydantic payloads across nodes — and @on(default=True) for a catch-all handler:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from lapinbeam import actor, on


@dataclass
class Task:
    payload_id: int
    name: str


@actor(name="worker")
class Worker:
    @on(Task)
    async def handle_task(self, msg: Task):
        ...

    @on(default=True)
    async def handle_other(self, msg):
        print("unrecognized message:", msg)

An actor with any @on handler stops using receive entirely; a message whose type has no dedicated handler and no @on(default=True) fallback raises TypeError (crashing the actor, so Supervisor restarts it like any other unhandled exception). Actors that only define receive are unaffected.

Development

uv sync                       # create .venv, build the extension, install deps
uv run maturin develop        # fast rebuild of the Rust extension
uv run pytest                 # Python test suite
cargo test                    # Rust test suite
uv run python bench/bench_remote.py   # throughput benchmarks
uv run python bench/bench_latency.py  # RTT latency percentiles
uv run python bench/bench_codec.py    # codec + JSON conversion path, layer by layer
uv run python bench/bench_memory.py   # RSS under sustained load, connection churn, and mailbox backpressure

Nothing is installed on the OS: everything lives in .venv.

Documentation

Full docs (English + Spanish) live under docs/ and build with MkDocs + Material:

uv sync --group docs           # installs mkdocs, mkdocs-material, mkdocs-static-i18n
uv run mkdocs serve             # http://127.0.0.1:8000, live-reloads on edits
uv run mkdocs build --strict    # static site in site/ (gitignored)

Each page has an English file (e.g. docs/getting-started.md) and its Spanish translation (docs/getting-started.es.md); mkdocs-static-i18n serves the Spanish build under /es/ with a language switcher.

Benchmark snapshot

Measured on this machine (Python 3.14, loopback):

Limitations

• Payloads must be JSON-compatible (dict/list/str/int/float/bool/None). Ints are limited to i64/u64; larger ints raise TypeError.
• __lb_type__ is a reserved payload key (used by the type-preserving codecs).
• Type preservation happens only on remote sends; local sends pass the object by reference (zero-copy). A Pydantic field typed loosely (e.g. Any) won't get a nested @dataclass value reconstructed on decode — it comes back as a plain dict instead; a properly-typed field (e.g. inner: Inner) round-trips fine via Pydantic's own validation.
• Actor names must be unique per node — Supervisor.spawn() raises ValueError if the name is already registered to a different actor. Simultaneous dial (both nodes connecting to each other at once) is resolved deterministically — exactly one connection survives, not two.
• No message persistence and no at-least-once delivery: a message in flight during a network partition is lost, not retried. See lapinbeam vs. Celery + RabbitMQ for what that means in practice.
• Actor mailboxes are unbounded by default: an actor that can't keep up with its inbound rate has its mailbox grow without limit instead of applying backpressure. Pass Node(..., mailbox_capacity=N) to cap it — a full mailbox then drops new messages instead, firing on_event(kind="mailbox_full") (and, for a dropped remote send, an "error" event back on the sender).
• Payloads larger than 16 MiB are rejected on the sender.

Publishing to PyPI

uv build                      # produce wheel (abi3) + sdist in dist/
uv publish                    # upload to PyPI (uses UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN)

CI (./.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs the test matrix on Python 3.11-3.14, a Docker Compose end-to-end check, and builds the distributable artifacts.

Project layout

src/           Rust core (_core extension module)
lapinbeam/     Pure-Python layer (@actor, Node, Supervisor, refs)
tests/         Rust integration tests
tests-python/  Python tests (pytest)
examples/      Two-node bidirectional demo, a multi-node HTTP pipeline demo,
               a seed-node discovery demo, a supervision-tree/links/groups
               demo, plus E2E fixtures used by CI
bench/         Throughput, latency, codec, and memory benchmarks

License

MIT