Good news.

How does this compare to Actix? Actix seems to take advantage of Rust’s actor system.

Rust does not have an actor system, there are multiple libraries that implement actor systems however, and no, Actix does not implement an actor system, it’s a standard async library, like rocket or warp or whatever else. Actix and Rocket are both ‘higher level’ in that they have more functionality and addins than lower level libraries like warp and so forth. The big thing about actix is that it is its own ecosystem, where rocket (and warp and the like 20 others) are all built on things like tower, so they can interoperate. No real speed difference between any of them anymore.