Enable Agents to send messages to themselves.

[totorigolo]

Add methods on AgentLink to allow sending messages to itself, as ComponentLink can do. What do you think? 🙂

Related to: #1209

[jstarry]

@totorigolo did you randomly think to do this? Haha, @mkawalec just opened a PR to do the same #1214 🤣

Can you two sort out which API is preferred? send_message or send 😄

[mkawalec]

:D I personally prefer send over send_message as the types document what we are sending and send is used in other places in Yew.

[mkawalec]

@totorigolo I like that this unifies the API between agents and components. My vote is on this implementation over my PR :)

[totorigolo]

@jstarry I had a tab opened in my browser since like two days, in order to test that it works as expected. But yes, this just came as a need while using agents 🙂

And I just discovered about this issue hunt thingy. @mkawalec add/improve an example in a PR and it's yours 😉

About the naming, since there are two message types that you could send to agents (Agent::Message and Agent::Input), and since we cannot handle both with the same function, I think that naming it send_message is more explicit. Plus it's consistent with components.

Talking about the consistency, what about making it a trait, implemented for AgentLink and ComponentLink, with send_message, send_message_batch and callback?

[jstarry]

Haha impeccable timing ;)

If the trait is just for enforcing consistency, I don't think it's necessary

[jstarry]

I think we can drop the batch method unless you can share a good usecase for it!

[jstarry]

It doesnt look like this adds much value. It's nice to have message batching for components to reduce renders, but not needed for agents

[totorigolo]

I kept it for consistency, never used it.

[totorigolo]

However, AgentScope's send function does some work for each message: cloning, boxing, pushing in a vec so potentially allocating, locking using Rc<RefCell<()>>. If sending a batch is really needed, this should offer a nice boost. But on the other hand, it's easy to implement if needed, knowing that it's already possible to alternatively send a Msg::Batch(vec![...]).

[mkawalec]

@totorigolo I'll add the example I had in the other PR in a separate PR once this is merged.

[totorigolo]

@mkawalec Sure! Could you just add a message sent from handle_input?

@jstarry Is this ready to merge?