dactor 1.3.0

An actor system for Dart

1.3.0

• ask() no longer retries by default. AskConfig() now has enableRetries: false. A retry re-sends the request, so with the old default a slow (not failed) actor executed the same command up to four times, and an ask to a dead actor blocked the caller for about 20 s. AskConfig.development() and AskConfig.production() still enable retries explicitly. Retries keep the same correlationId across attempts so receivers can deduplicate.
• Fixed the Quick Start in the README and example/dactor_example.dart. Both tested message is LocalMessage inside onMessage, which is never true because actors receive the payload; the counter never incremented and the ask timed out. They now switch on the payload and reply via context.sender.
• Removed the unused cbor dependency and the "zero dependencies" claim.
• Added a .pubignore so doc/ and repository tooling are not published.
• A system built without a config no longer collects metrics or traces. The previous defaults, InMemoryMetricsCollector and InMemoryTraceCollector, kept a timing sample for every message and a trace event (holding the payload) for every send and receive, forever; measured at roughly 485 MB retained per million messages. The defaults are now NoOpMetricsCollector and NoOpTraceCollector. Pass an explicit collector to opt in. Also added NoOpLogCollector.
• InMemoryMetricsCollector and InMemoryTraceCollector are now bounded (maxTimings per metric and maxEvents overall, both 10,000 by default). The tracer evicts whole correlation ids, oldest first, and exposes eventCount and clear(); traces is now a read-only view.
• dactor.dart now exports the metrics, tracing, logging and routing libraries (Pool, RoutingLogic, the collectors, LogRecord, ...), which already appeared in public signatures but could only be imported from src/.
• Supervision is routed by an explicit parent record, not by parsing / in the actor id. Previously the system took everything before the last / as the supervisor and cast it with as SupervisorActor; an actor named plain/evil under a non-supervisor plain therefore killed the whole process with an unhandled TypeError on its first failure, and any actor could attach itself to a foreign supervisor by choosing its name. Children are now created through SupervisorActor.supervise (internally LocalActorSystem.spawnChild), which records the parent, requires the parent to be a live Supervisor, and rejects child ids that are empty or contain /. Actors spawned with a / in their id through spawn are ordinary unsupervised actors. RouterActor supervises its workers through the same path. Added test/supervision_guard_test.dart.
• Restart now happens in place. Previously a restart stopped the actor and spawned a new one, which created a new ActorRef; every reference held by other actors (including pool workers) then went to dead letters, pending messages were discarded, watchers received Terminated, and event-bus subscriptions were lost. A restart now keeps the ref, mailbox, watchers and subscriptions and only replaces the Actor instance: postStop on the old one, timers cancelled, preStart on the new one. SupervisorActor and RouterActor use this path. Messages are never dispatched to an actor whose preStart has not completed. Added test/restart_test.dart.
• Errors thrown while handling a child failure (for example a replacement's preStart throwing) no longer escape as unhandled zone errors. The child is stopped, actors.supervision_failed is incremented and the error is logged.
• Add dactor_test as a dev dependency. The 1.2.0 release moved the test toolkit out of this package but never declared it, so 9 of the 12 test files could not load from a clean checkout. Added a GitHub Actions workflow that runs dart analyze and the unit tests on every push and pull request.
• README: the testing section now points at the dactor_test package.
• Fix shutdown() not stopping any actor. stop() returned early once the shutdown flag was set, so postStop never ran, timers kept firing (keeping the isolate alive), refs stayed isAlive, and late messages were silently queued instead of dead-lettered. Actors are now torn down in reverse spawn order during shutdown. Added test/shutdown_test.dart.

1.2.0

• Fix actor model correctness, supervision, and messaging issues
• Remove test from regular dependencies (was incorrectly listed as runtime dep)
• Extract test utilities into separate dactor_test package

1.1.0

• Docs: Added comprehensive documentation for testing actors, including TestActorSystem, TestProbe, and message tracing.

1.0.0

• Initial version.