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

What is a future?

A future is a representation of some operation that will be completed in the future.

Async in Rust uses a poll-based approach in which an asynchronous task will have three phases:

  1. The poll phase: A future is polled, which results in the task progressing until a point where it can no longer make progress. We often refer to the part of the runtime that polls a future as an executor.
  2. The wait phase: An event source, most often referred to as a reactor, registers that a future is waiting for an event to happen and makes sure that it will wake the future when that event is ready.
  3. The wake phase: The event happens and the future is woken up. It’s now up to the executor that polled the future in step 1 to schedule the future to be polled again and make further progress until it completes or reaches a new point where it can’t make further progress and the cycle repeats.

Now, when we talk about futures, I find it useful to make a distinction...