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

Coroutines, Self-Referential Structs, and Pinning

In this chapter, we’ll start by improving our coroutines by adding the ability to store variables across state changes. We’ll see how this leads to our coroutines needing to take references to themselves and the issues that arise as a result of that. The reason for dedicating a whole chapter to this topic is that it’s an integral part of getting async/await to work in Rust, and also a topic that is somewhat difficult to get a good understanding of.

The reason for this is that the whole concept of pinning is foreign to many developers and just like the Rust ownership system, it takes some time to get a good and working mental model of it.

Fortunately, the concept of pinning is not that difficult to understand, but how it’s implemented in the language and how it interacts with Rust’s type system is abstract and hard to grasp.

While we won’t cover absolutely everything about pinning in...