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

Design and introduction to epoll

Okay, so this chapter will be centered around one main example you can find in the repository under ch04/a-epoll. We’ll start by taking a look at how we design our example.

As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, we’ll take our inspiration from mio. This has one big upside and one downside. The upside is that we get a gentle introduction to how mio is designed, making it much easier to dive into that code base if you want to learn more than what we cover in this example. The downside is that we introduce an overly thick abstraction layer over epoll, including some design decisions that are very specific to mio.

I think the upsides outweigh the downsides for the simple reason that if you ever want to implement a production-quality event loop, you’ll probably want to look into the implementations that are already out there, and the same goes for if you want to dig deeper into the building blocks of asynchronous programming...