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

Pinning in Rust

The following diagram shows a slightly more complex self-referential struct so that we have something visual to help us understand:

Figure 9.3 – Moving a self-referential struct with three fields

Figure 9.3 – Moving a self-referential struct with three fields

At a very high level, pinning makes it possible to rely on data that has a stable memory address by disallowing any operation that might move it:

Figure 9.4 – Moving a pinned struct

Figure 9.4 – Moving a pinned struct

The concept of pinning is pretty simple. The complex part is how it’s implemented in the language and how it’s used.

Pinning in theory

Pinning is a part of Rust’s standard library and consists of two parts: the type, Pin, and the marker-trait, Unpin. Pinning is only a language construct. There is no special kind of location or memory that you move values to so they get pinned. There is no syscall to ask the operating system to ensure a value stays the same place in memory. It’s only a part...