Heh, yeah I guess tractor.run() is kinda dumb..

[goodboy]

This is somewhat of a 🤦🏼 and directly related to #168.

Thanks to the trio crowd for pointing out that we can probably just make ourselves a:

import tractor
import trio

async main():
    async with tractor.open_runtime():
        .. do tractor things since this is a task...
        
trio.run(main)

Some benefits to this:

• it's not scary since it's trio.run() 🤯
• we can run certain parts of code with debug_mode=True ?
• the whole process tree can be restarted easily from scratch
• we aren't hijacking trio.run() when we really have no reason to

Some worries:

• starting multiple "runtimes" (aka root actors) in a single program will cause mailbox collisions
  • maybe we could have a .open_root_runtime() which can only be called once per program?
  • is this solved by just avoiding channel server address collisions?
• maybe more?

Is there a better name?

• .open_root()
• .start_runtime()
• start_root()

Lurkerzzzz!!!

[richardsheridan]

IMHO the ideal API would be:

async with tractor.open_actor_nursery() as n:
    n.start_soon(async_fn)

And tractor should take care of any global bookkeeping internally, if there is such a thing. $0.02 :)

[goodboy]

@richardsheridan only problem is there might only ever be one "actor_nursery* open per program.

Also note, in current parlance, an ActorNursery is a nursery which spawns actors - aka new processes running trio.run(). So I don't think calling the top level entry point for starting all the machinery/runtime (that makes actor spawning possible) a "nursery" necessarily makes sense. It's actually more along the lines of the root task in trio, I think.

maybe .open_root_actor()?

[goodboy]

Hmm thinking more on this I wonder if we can just do implicit runtime startup (only in the root process) on the first entry to tractor.open_nursery()?

I'm thinking there should still be an explicit .start_root_actor_runtime() or whatever but that can be implicitly called if we find tractor.is_root_process() == True when entering the .open_nursery() block.

[goodboy]

The removal of tractor.run() is going to require a big edit of the test set and examples.

• tractor_test is going to need to be redone
• the boatload of tests still using it
• all the docs examples

[goodboy]

Resolved with #197.
Full .run() removal will come in a upcoming release.