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

The stack

A stack is nothing more than a piece of contiguous memory.

This is important to know. A computer only has memory, it doesn’t have a special stack memory and a heap memory; it’s all part of the same memory.

The difference is how this memory is accessed and used. The stack supports simple push/pop instructions on a contiguous part of memory, that’s what makes it fast to use. The heap memory is allocated by a memory allocator on demand and can be scattered around in different locations.

We’ll not go through the differences between the stack and the heap here since there are numerous articles explaining them in detail, including a chapter in The Rust Programming Language at https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.html#the-stack-and-the-heap.

What does the stack look like?

Let’s start with a simplified view of the stack. A 64-bit CPU will read 8 bytes at a time. Even though the natural way for us to see...