Implement a Weak mpsc Sender variant

[jmagnuson]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The tokio actor pattern described in @Darksonn's blog post is very useful and pervasive. But one use-case that I've struggled with is when the actor needs to send messages to itself. A mpsc::Sender<ActorMessage> (by way of MyActorHandle) can be cloned into the actor body, but then RAII of Sender copies can no longer be relied on as a signal to shut the actor down, since it will always hold a Handle to itself.

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, the actor could retain a "weak" Sender such that it does not count in RAII semantics (when the Receiver should terminate). The mpsc Sender variants could offer a ::downgrade API, similar to Arc::downgrade in stdlib.

Or, if a separate type isn't viable, perhaps [unsafe] mutation of the internal Sender count could be exposed, such as Arc::decrement_strong_count.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently, we roll our own actor-rx Stream which selects on both the RAII Sender, as well as a separate actor Sender:

let combined_rx = async_stream::stream! {
    loop {
        tokio::select!(
            Some(req) = &mut actor_rx.next() => {
                yield req;
            }
            maybe_req = &mut handle_rx.next() => {
                if let Some(req) = maybe_req {
                    yield req;
                } else {
                    break;
                }
            }
        )
    }
};

This works, but adds extra complexity, and we lose out on being able to use native tokio Receiver functionality within the actor.

Additional context

This feature was previously requested in #1637, but was never followed-up on by the author and was subsequently closed.

This idea was also floated for stdlib's mpsc in RFC rust-lang/rfcs#1549, but doesn't seem to have made any progress.

[Darksonn]

It's an interesting suggestion, though it would add a fair amount of complexity to the mpsc channel.

One alternative to your custom stream is a struct like this:

use std::collections::VecDeque;
use tokio::sync::mpsc::Receiver;

pub struct InjectableReceiver<T> {
    receiver: Receiver<T>,
    inject: VecDeque<T>,
}

impl<T> InjectableReceiver<T> {
    pub fn new(receiver: Receiver<T>) -> Self {
        Self {
            receiver,
            inject: VecDeque::new(),
        }
    }
    
    pub fn add(&mut self, msg: T) {
        self.inject.push_back(msg);
    }
    
    pub async fn recv(&mut self) -> Option<T> {
        if let Some(msg) = self.inject.pop_front() {
            Some(msg)
        } else {
            self.receiver.recv().await
        }
    }
}

Note that the &mut in your select are unnecessary.