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

Discovering self-referential structs

What happened is that we created a self-referential struct, initialized it so that it took a pointer to itself, and then moved it. Let’s take a closer look:

  1. First, we received a future object as an argument to block_on. This is not a problem since the future isn’t self-referential yet, so we can move it around wherever we want to without issues (this is also why moving futures before they’re polled is perfectly fine using proper async/await).
  2. Then, we polled the future once. The optimization we did made one essential change. The future was located on the stack (inside the stack frame of our block_on function) when we polled it the first time.
  3. When we polled the future the first time, we initialized the variables to their initial state. Our writer variable took a pointer to our buffer variable (stored as a part of our coroutine) and made it self-referential at this point.
  4. The first time we polled the future...