Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By : Brian L. Troutwine
Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By: Brian L. Troutwine

Overview of this book

Most programming languages can really complicate things, especially with regard to unsafe memory access. The burden on you, the programmer, lies across two domains: understanding the modern machine and your language's pain-points. This book will teach you to how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more. The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems. By the end of the book, you will feel comfortable with designing safe, consistent, parallel, and high-performance applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

More mutexes, condvars, and friends in action


Admittedly, the examples in the preceding sections got a little convoluted. There's a reason to that madness, I promise, but before we move on I'd like to show you some working examples from the charming The Little Book of Semaphores. This book, in case you skipped previous bibliographic notes, is a collection of concurrency puzzles suitable for self-learning, on account of the puzzles being amusing and coming with good hints. As the title implies, the book does make use of the semaphore primitive, which Rust does not have. Though, as mentioned in the previous chapter, we will build a semaphore in the next chapter.

The rocket preparation problem

This puzzle does not actually appear in The Little Book of Semaphores but it is based on one of the puzzles there - the cigarette smoker's problem from section 4.5. Personally, I think cigarettes are gross so we're going to reword things a touch. The idea is the same.

We have four threads in total. One thread...