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 Lua into Rust


Many of the programs we've discussed in this book use a report thread to notify the user of the running behavior of the program. Each of these report functions have been coded in Rust, an unchanging part of the executable. What if, however, we wanted end-users to be able to supply their own reporting routine? Or, consider the cernan project (https://crates.io/crates/cernan), discussed previously in this book, which supports a programmable filter, an online data-stream filter that can be programmed by end-users without changing the cernan binary. How do you pull such a trick off?

A common answer, not just in Rust but in many compiled languages, is to embed a Lua interpreter (https://www.lua.org/) and read user programs in at startup. It's such a common answer, in fact, that there are many Lua embeddings to choose from in the crates ecosystem. We'll use rlua (https://crates.io/crates/rlua) here as it's a safe choice and the project documentation is very good. Other Lua...