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

Challenges with asynchronous Rust

So, while we’ve seen with our own eyes that the executor and reactor could be loosely coupled, which in turn means that you could in theory mix and match reactors and executors, the question is why do we encounter so much friction when trying to do just that?

Most programmers that have used async Rust have experienced problems caused by incompatible async libraries, and we saw an example of the kind of error message you would get previously.

To understand this, we have to dive a little bit deeper into the existing async runtimes in Rust, specifically those we typically use for desktop and server applications.

Explicit versus implicit reactor instantiation

Info

The type of future we’ll talk about going forward is leaf futures, the kind that actually represents an I/O operation (for example, HttpGetFuture).

When you create a runtime in Rust, you also need to create non-blocking primitives of the Rust standard library....