% Concurrency
Concurrency and parallelism are incredibly important topics in computer science, and are also a hot topic in industry today. Computers are gaining more and more cores, yet many programmers aren't prepared to fully utilize them.
Rust's memory safety features also apply to its concurrency story too. Even concurrent Rust programs must be memory safe, having no data races. Rust's type system is up to the task, and gives you powerful ways to reason about concurrent code at compile time.
Before we talk about the concurrency features that come with Rust, it's important to understand something: Rust is low-level enough that the vast majority of this is provided by the standard library, not by the language. This means that if you don't like some aspect of the way Rust handles concurrency, you can implement an alternative way of doing things. mio is a real-world example of this principle in action.
Background: Send and Sync
Concurrency is difficult to reason about. In Rust, we have a strong, static type system to help us reason about our code. As such, Rust gives us two traits to help us make sense of code that can possibly be concurrent.
Send
The first trait we're going to talk about is
[Send](../std/marker/trait.Send.html). When a type T implements Send, it
indicates that something of this type is able to have ownership transferred
safely between threads.
This is important to enforce certain restrictions. For example, if we have a
channel connecting two threads, we would want to be able to send some data
down the channel and to the other thread. Therefore, we'd ensure that Send was
implemented for that type.
In the opposite way, if we were wrapping a library with FFI that isn't
threadsafe, we wouldn't want to implement Send, and so the compiler will help
us enforce that it can't leave the current thread.
Sync
The second of these traits is called [Sync](../std/marker/trait.Sync.html).
When a type T implements Sync, it indicates that something
of this type has no possibility of introducing memory unsafety when used from
multiple threads concurrently through shared references. This implies that
types which don't have interior mutability are inherently
Sync, which includes simple primitive types (like u8) and aggregate types
containing them.
For sharing references across threads, Rust provides a wrapper type called
Arc<T>. Arc<T> implements Send and Sync if and only if T implements
both Send and Sync. For example, an object of type Arc<RefCell<U>> cannot
be transferred across threads because
[RefCell](choosing-your-guarantees.html#refcellt) does not implement
Sync, consequently Arc<RefCell<U>> would not implement Send.
These two traits allow you to use the type system to make strong guarantees about the properties of your code under concurrency. Before we demonstrate why, we need to learn how to create a concurrent Rust program in the first place!
Threads
Rust's standard library provides a library for threads, which allow you to
run Rust code in parallel. Here's a basic example of using std::thread:
use std::thread;
fn main() {
thread::spawn(|| {
println!("Hello from a thread!");
});
}
The thread::spawn() method accepts a closure, which is executed in a
new thread. It returns a handle to the thread, that can be used to
wait for the child thread to finish and extract its result:
use std::thread;
fn main() {
let handle = thread::spawn(|| {
"Hello from a thread!"
});
println!("{}", handle.join().unwrap());
}
Many languages have the ability to execute threads, but it's wildly unsafe. There are entire books about how to prevent errors that occur from shared mutable state. Rust helps out with its type system here as well, by preventing data races at compile time. Let's talk about how you actually share things between threads.
Safe Shared Mutable State
Due to Rust's type system, we have a concept that sounds like a lie: "safe shared mutable state." Many programmers agree that shared mutable state is very, very bad.
Someone once said this:
Shared mutable state is the root of all evil. Most languages attempt to deal with this problem through the 'mutable' part, but Rust deals with it by solving the 'shared' part.
The same ownership system that helps prevent using pointers incorrectly also helps rule out data races, one of the worst kinds of concurrency bugs.
As an example, here is a Rust program that would have a data race in many languages. It will not compile:
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
fn main() {
let mut data = vec![1, 2, 3];
for i in 0..3 {
thread::spawn(move || {
data[i] += 1;
});
}
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(50));
}
This gives us an error:
8:17 error: capture of moved value: `data`
data[i] += 1;
^~~~
Rust knows this wouldn't be safe! If we had a reference to data in each
thread, and the thread takes ownership of the reference, we'd have three
owners!
So, we need some type that lets us have more than one reference to a value and
that we can share between threads, that is it must implement Sync.
We'll use Arc<T>, Rust's standard atomic reference count type, which
wraps a value up with some extra runtime bookkeeping which allows us to
share the ownership of the value between multiple references at the same time.
The bookkeeping consists of a count of how many of these references exist to the value, hence the reference count part of the name.
The Atomic part means Arc<T> can safely be accessed from multiple threads.
To do this the compiler guarantees that mutations of the internal count use
indivisible operations which can't have data races.
use std::thread;
use std::sync::Arc;
use std::time::Duration;
fn main() {
let mut data = Arc::new(vec![1, 2, 3]);
for i in 0..3 {
let data = data.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
data[i] += 1;
});
}
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(50));
}
We now call clone() on our Arc<T>, which increases the internal count.
This handle is then moved into the new thread.
And... still gives us an error.
<anon>:11:24 error: cannot borrow immutable borrowed content as mutable
<anon>:11 data[i] += 1;
^~~~
Arc<T> assumes one more property about its contents to ensure that it is safe
to share across threads: it assumes its contents are Sync. This is true for
our value if it's immutable, but we want to be able to mutate it, so we need
something else to persuade the borrow checker we know what we're doing.
It looks like we need some type that allows us to safely mutate a shared value, for example a type that can ensure only one thread at a time is able to mutate the value inside it at any one time.
For that, we can use the Mutex<T> type!
Here's the working version:
use std::sync::{Arc, Mutex};
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
fn main() {
let data = Arc::new(Mutex::new(vec![1, 2, 3]));
for i in 0..3 {
let data = data.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
let mut data = data.lock().unwrap();
data[i] += 1;
});
}
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(50));
}
Note that the value of i is bound (copied) to the closure and not shared
among the threads.
Also note that [lock](../std/sync/struct.Mutex.html#method.lock) method of
[Mutex](../std/sync/struct.Mutex.html) has this signature:
fn lock(&self) -> LockResult<MutexGuard<T>>
and because Send is not implemented for MutexGuard<T>, the guard cannot
cross thread boundaries, ensuring thread-locality of lock acquire and release.
Let's examine the body of the thread more closely:
# use std::sync::{Arc, Mutex};
# use std::thread;
# use std::time::Duration;
# fn main() {
# let data = Arc::new(Mutex::new(vec![1, 2, 3]));
# for i in 0..3 {
# let data = data.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
let mut data = data.lock().unwrap();
data[i] += 1;
});
# }
# thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(50));
# }
First, we call lock(), which acquires the mutex's lock. Because this may fail,
it returns an Result<T, E>, and because this is just an example, we unwrap()
it to get a reference to the data. Real code would have more robust error handling
here. We're then free to mutate it, since we have the lock.
Lastly, while the threads are running, we wait on a short timer. But this is not ideal: we may have picked a reasonable amount of time to wait but it's more likely we'll either be waiting longer than necessary or not long enough, depending on just how much time the threads actually take to finish computing when the program runs.
A more precise alternative to the timer would be to use one of the mechanisms provided by the Rust standard library for synchronizing threads with each other. Let's talk about one of them: channels.
Channels
Here's a version of our code that uses channels for synchronization, rather than waiting for a specific time:
use std::sync::{Arc, Mutex};
use std::thread;
use std::sync::mpsc;
fn main() {
let data = Arc::new(Mutex::new(0));
// `tx` is the "transmitter" or "sender"
// `rx` is the "receiver"
let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();
for _ in 0..10 {
let (data, tx) = (data.clone(), tx.clone());
thread::spawn(move || {
let mut data = data.lock().unwrap();
*data += 1;
tx.send(()).unwrap();
});
}
for _ in 0..10 {
rx.recv().unwrap();
}
}
We use the mpsc::channel() method to construct a new channel. We send
a simple () down the channel, and then wait for ten of them to come back.
While this channel is sending a generic signal, we can send any data that
is Send over the channel!
use std::thread;
use std::sync::mpsc;
fn main() {
let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();
for i in 0..10 {
let tx = tx.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
let answer = i * i;
tx.send(answer).unwrap();
});
}
for _ in 0..10 {
println!("{}", rx.recv().unwrap());
}
}
Here we create 10 threads, asking each to calculate the square of a number (i
at the time of spawn()), and then send() back the answer over the channel.
Panics
A panic! will crash the currently executing thread. You can use Rust's
threads as a simple isolation mechanism:
use std::thread;
let handle = thread::spawn(move || {
panic!("oops!");
});
let result = handle.join();
assert!(result.is_err());
Thread.join() gives us a Result back, which allows us to check if the thread
has panicked or not.
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