Actix is Multiple Things

Actix is a few things. The base of it is a powerful actor system for Rust on top of which the actix-web system was originally built. This is what you are most likely going to work with. What actix-web gives you is a fun and very fast web development framework.

We call actix-web a small and pragmatic framework. For all intents and purposes it's a microframework with a few twists. If you are already a Rust programmer you will probably find yourself at home quickly, but even if you are coming from another programming language you should find actix-web easy to pick up.

An application developed with actix-web will expose an HTTP server contained within a native executable. You can either put this behind another HTTP server like nginx or serve it up as-is. Even in the complete absence of another HTTP server actix-web is powerful enough to provide HTTP 1 and HTTP 2 support as well as SSL/TLS. This makes it useful for building small services ready for distribution.

Most importantly: actix-web runs on Rust {{< rust-version "actix-web" >}} or later and it works with stable releases.