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

Embedding C into Rust – feruscore without processes


When we wrapped up our discussion of feruscore in the previous chapter, we'd constructed a program that could discover corewars warriors through simulated natural selection. This was done by writing evolved warriors out to disk, using Rust's OS process interface to call out to pmars—the de facto standard MARS—and competing them to discover their relative fitness. We used Rayon—Rust's very convenient data parallelism library—to distribute the workload of competitions between available CPUs. Unfortunately, the implementation was pretty slow. Building a tournament selection criteria was maybe more difficult to express than we might have hoped—though I'm sure there a bright-spark of a reader out there who will improve that substantially and wow me. The real pain point was serializing every warrior to disk multiple times, allocating similar structures repeatedly to establish each round, and then eating pmars' allocation and parsing overhead...