While the state is indeed a separate struct in ractor there's actually a good reason for this. It's because the state is constructed by the actor and it's guaranteed that the construction is the state is managed by the startup flow and panic safe.

Imagine opening a socket, if you have a mutable self the caller who is going to spawn that actor needs to open the socket themselves and risk the failure there. Instead of the actor who would eventually be responsible for said socket. This is outlined in our docs the motivation for this. Essentially the actor is responsible for creation of their state and any risks associated with that.

- for the async trait point we actually do support the native async traits without the boxing magic macro. It's a feature you can disable if you so wish but it impacts factories since you can't then box traits with native future returns https://github.com/slawlor/ractor/pull/202

(For transparency I'm the author of ractor)