Rust Message Passing - rFronteddu/general_wiki GitHub Wiki

One increasingly popular approach to ensuring safe concurrency is message passing, where threads or actors communicate by sending each other messages containing data. To accomplish message-sending concurrency, Rust’s standard library provides an implementation of channels. A channel is a general programming concept by which data is sent from one thread to another.

A channel has two halves: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter half is the upstream location where you put rubber ducks into the river, and the receiver half is where the rubber duck ends up downstream. One part of your code calls methods on the transmitter with the data you want to send, and another part checks the receiving end for arriving messages. A channel is said to be closed if either the transmitter or receiver half is dropped.

We create a new channel using the mpsc::channel function; mpsc stands for multiple producer, single consumer. In short, the way Rust’s standard library implements channels means a channel can have multiple sending ends that produce values but only one receiving end that consumes those values. Imagine multiple streams flowing together into one big river: everything sent down any of the streams will end up in one river at the end. We’ll start with a single producer for now, but we’ll add multiple producers when we get this example working.

The mpsc::channel function returns a tuple, the first element of which is the sending end—the transmitter—and the second element is the receiving end—the receiver. The abbreviations tx and rx are traditionally used in many fields for transmitter and receiver respectively, so we name our variables as such to indicate each end. We’re using a let statement with a pattern that destructures the tuples.

use std::sync::mpsc;
use std::thread;

fn main() {
    let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();

    thread::spawn(move || {
        let val = String::from("hi");
        tx.send(val).unwrap();
    });
}

Again, we’re using thread::spawn to create a new thread and then using move to move tx into the closure so the spawned thread owns tx. The spawned thread needs to own the transmitter to be able to send messages through the channel. The transmitter has a send method that takes the value we want to send. The send method returns a Result<T, E> type, so if the receiver has already been dropped and there’s nowhere to send a value, the send operation will return an error. In this example, we’re calling unwrap to panic in case of an error. But in a real application, we would handle it properly.

use std::sync::mpsc;
use std::thread;

fn main() {
    let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();

    thread::spawn(move || {
        let val = String::from("hi");
        tx.send(val).unwrap();
    });

    let received = rx.recv().unwrap();
    println!("Got: {received}");
}

The receiver has two useful methods: recv and try_recv. We’re using recv, short for receive, which will block the main thread’s execution and wait until a value is sent down the channel. Once a value is sent, recv will return it in a Result<T, E>. When the transmitter closes, recv will return an error to signal that no more values will be coming.

The try_recv method doesn’t block, but will instead return a Result<T, E> immediately: an Ok value holding a message if one is available and an Err value if there aren’t any messages this time. Using try_recv is useful if this thread has other work to do while waiting for messages: we could write a loop that calls try_recv every so often, handles a message if one is available, and otherwise does other work for a little while until checking again.

We’ve used recv in this example for simplicity; we don’t have any other work for the main thread to do other than wait for messages, so blocking the main thread is appropriate.

The ownership rules play a vital role in message sending because they help you write safe, concurrent code. Preventing errors in concurrent programming is the advantage of thinking about ownership throughout your Rust programs.

The send function takes ownership of its parameter, and when the value is moved, the receiver takes ownership of it. This stops us from accidentally using the value again after sending it; the ownership system checks that everything is okay.

use std::sync::mpsc;
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;

fn main() {
    let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();

    thread::spawn(move || {
        let vals = vec![
            String::from("hi"),
            String::from("from"),
            String::from("the"),
            String::from("thread"),
        ];

        for val in vals {
            tx.send(val).unwrap();
            thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs(1));
        }
    });

    for received in rx {
        println!("Got: {received}");
    }
}

This time, the spawned thread has a vector of strings that we want to send to the main thread. We iterate over them, sending each individually, and pause between each by calling the thread::sleep function with a Duration value of 1 second.

In the main thread, we’re not calling the recv function explicitly anymore: instead, we’re treating rx as an iterator. For each value received, we’re printing it. When the channel is closed, iteration will end.

Earlier we mentioned that mpsc was an acronym for multiple producer, single consumer. Let’s put mpsc to use and expand the code to create multiple threads that all send values to the same receiver. We can do so by cloning the transmitter:

    // --snip--

    let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();

    let tx1 = tx.clone();
    thread::spawn(move || {
        let vals = vec![
            String::from("hi"),
            String::from("from"),
            String::from("the"),
            String::from("thread"),
        ];

        for val in vals {
            tx1.send(val).unwrap();
            thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs(1));
        }
    });

    thread::spawn(move || {
        let vals = vec![
            String::from("more"),
            String::from("messages"),
            String::from("for"),
            String::from("you"),
        ];

        for val in vals {
            tx.send(val).unwrap();
            thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs(1));
        }
    });

    for received in rx {
        println!("Got: {received}");
    }

    // --snip--

This time, before we create the first spawned thread, we call clone on the transmitter. This will give us a new transmitter we can pass to the first spawned thread. We pass the original transmitter to a second spawned thread. This gives us two threads, each sending different messages to the one receiver.