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

System calls, FFI, and cross-platform abstractions

We’ll implement a very basic syscall for the three architectures: BSD/macOS, Linux, and Windows. We’ll also see how this is implemented in three levels of abstraction.

The syscall we’ll implement is the one used when we write something to the standard output (stdout) since that is such a common operation and it’s interesting to see how it really works.

We’ll start off by looking at the lowest level of abstraction we can use to make system calls and build our understanding of them from the ground up.

The lowest level of abstraction

The lowest level of abstraction is to write what is often referred to as a “raw” syscall. A raw syscall is one that bypasses the OS-provided library for making syscalls and instead relies on the OS having a stable syscall ABI. A stable syscall ABI means it guarantees that if you put the right data in certain registers and call a specific CPU instruction...