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

Concurrency versus parallelism

Right off the bat, we’ll dive into this subject by defining what concurrency is. Since it is quite easy to confuse concurrent with parallel, we will try to make a clear distinction between the two from the get-go.

Important

Concurrency is about dealing with a lot of things at the same time.

Parallelism is about doing a lot of things at the same time.

We call the concept of progressing multiple tasks at the same time multitasking. There are two ways to multitask. One is by progressing tasks concurrently, but not at the same time. Another is to progress tasks at the exact same time in parallel. Figure 1.1 depicts the difference between the two scenarios:

Figure 1.1 – Multitasking two tasks

Figure 1.1 – Multitasking two tasks

First, we need to agree on some definitions:

  • Resource: This is something we need to be able to progress a task. Our resources are limited. This could be CPU time or memory.
  • Task: This is a set of operations...