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

async/await

The previous example could simply be written as the following using async/await keywords:

async fn async_main() {
    println!("Program starting")
    let txt = Http::get("/1000/HelloWorld").await;
    println!("{txt}");
    let txt2 = Http::("500/HelloWorld2").await;
    println!("{txt2}");
}

That’s seven lines of code, and it looks very familiar to code you’d write in a normal subroutine/function.

It turns out that we can let the compiler write these state machines for us instead of writing them ourselves. Not only that, we could get very far just using simple macros to help us, which is exactly how the current async/await syntax was prototyped before it became a part of the language. You can see an example of that at https://github.com/alexcrichton/futures-await.

The downside is of course that these...