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

Approaches to memory reclamation


In the discussion that follows, the three techniques are laid out roughly in order of their speed, slowest to fastest, as well as their difficulty, easiest to hardest. You should not be discouraged—you are now at one of the forefronts of the software engineering world. Welcome. Go boldly.

Reference counting

Reference-counting memory reclamation associates a piece of protected data with an atomic counter. Every thread reading or writing to that protected data increases the counter on acquisition and decreases the counter on de-acquisition. The thread to decrease the counter and find it as zero is the last to hold the data and may either mark the data as available for reclamation or deallocate it immediately. This should, hopefully, sound familiar. The Rust standard library ships with std::sync::Arc—discussed in Chapter 4Sync and Send – the Foundation of Rust Concurrency, and Chapter 5, Locks – Mutex, Condvar, Barriers and RWLock, especially—to fulfill this...