Book Image

Asynchronous Programming in Rust

By : Carl Fredrik Samson
5 (2)
Book Image

Asynchronous Programming in Rust

5 (2)
By: Carl Fredrik Samson

Overview of this book

Step into the world of asynchronous programming with confidence by conquering the challenges of unclear concepts with this hands-on guide. Using functional examples, this book simplifies the trickiest concepts, exploring goroutines, fibers, futures, and callbacks to help you navigate the vast Rust async ecosystem with ease. You’ll start by building a solid foundation in asynchronous programming and explore diverse strategies for modeling program flow. The book then guides you through concepts like epoll, coroutines, green threads, and callbacks using practical examples. The final section focuses on Rust, examining futures, generators, and the reactor-executor pattern. You’ll apply your knowledge to create your own runtime, solidifying expertise in this dynamic domain. Throughout the book, you’ll not only gain proficiency in Rust's async features but also see how Rust models asynchronous program flow. By the end of the book, you'll possess the knowledge and practical skills needed to actively contribute to the Rust async ecosystem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Asynchronous Programming Fundamentals
5
Part 2:Event Queues and Green Threads
8
Part 3:Futures and async/await in Rust

Introduction to stackless coroutines

So, we’ve finally arrived at the point where we introduce the last method of modeling asynchronous operations in this book. You probably remember that we gave a high-level overview of stackful and stackless coroutines in Chapter 2. In Chapter 5, we implemented an example of stackful coroutines when writing our own fibers/green threads, so now it’s time to take a closer look at how stackless coroutines are implemented and used.

A stackless coroutine is a way of representing a task that can be interrupted and resumed. If you remember all the way back in Chapter 1, we mentioned that if we want tasks to run concurrently (be in progress at the same time) but not necessarily in parallel, we need to be able to pause and resume the task.

In its simplest form, a coroutine is just a task that can stop and resume by yielding control to either its caller, another coroutine, or a scheduler.

Many languages will have a coroutine implementation...