Add support to downcast a BoxedMessage to get a reference to it's wrapped type without consuming it about ractor

[kemitix]

That appears to be working for me. Pity to loose some of the strong typing, but that'd be the same with BoxedMessage.

Thanks for the advice.

[slawlor]

Can you make your message type

dyn Any?

Similar to what boxed message is doing behind the scenes. It means you have to cast to the expected type within your actors handler, however that's pretty similar to what Erlang does since there is no strong typing. If you want to go that route, the supervision model will protect you from unexpected casting errors causing your actor to crash

Does that solve your need? I also have kind of stumbled across this and didn't have a great solution at the time, however I have not myself explored using the Anytype but I think it should work.

[kemitix]

I'll have a look at using Any and see.

the supervision model will protect you from unexpected casting errors causing your actor to crash

Having the Actor crash on a bad cast would prevent the next cast attempt from being tried, no? I may be misunderstanding you.

I'll try adding the Any and see where that gets me.

[slawlor]

Yes you are right, on a crash you will lose the pending message queue as it'll be cleaned up with actor teardown. If you want to persist the message queue, usually what we would do is have a supervisor, of that single actor which is trying the downcast, which manages the queue and only allows the child to process one message at a time and maintain no queue.

It would sort of be like a factory of one, where the factory maintains an internal state of the messages in queue, and the child is a worker. If the child crashes, the supervisor can capture the crash and restart the child without losing the pending message queue