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

Cross-platform event queues

When creating a cross-platform event queue, you have to deal with the fact that you have to create one unified API that’s the same whether it’s used on Windows (IOCP), macOS (kqueue), or Linux (epoll). The most obvious difference is that IOCP is completion-based while kqueue and epoll are readiness-based.

This fundamental difference means that you have to make a choice:

  • You can create an abstraction that treats kqueue and epoll as completion-based queues, or
  • You can create an abstraction that treats IOCP as a readiness-based queue

From my personal experience, it’s a lot easier to create an abstraction that mimics a completion-based queue and handle the fact that kqueue and epoll are readiness-based behind the scenes than the other way around. The use of wepoll, as I alluded to earlier, is one way of creating a readiness-based queue on Windows. It will simplify creating such an API greatly, but we’ll leave...