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

Performance


In this section, we'll focus on the serial performance of a common data structure—associative arrays. We'll apply the tools we learned about in the previous chapter to probe different implementations. We'll focus on the associative array because it is fairly well-trod territory, studied in introductory computer science courses, and is available in most higher-level languages by default, Rust being no exception save the higher-level bit. We'll look at Rust's associative array first, which is called std::collections::HashMap.

Standard library HashMap

Let's poke around in HashMap's internals. A good starting place, I find, for inspecting unfamiliar Rust data structures is jumping into the source to the struct definition itself. Especially in the Rust codebase, there will be public rustdoc comments and private comments explaining implementation ambitions. The reader is warmly encouraged to inspect the HashMap comments for themselves. In this book, we're inspecting Rust at SHA da569fa9ddf8369a9809184d43c600dc06bd4b4d...