Unit 3.3 - Asynchronous Multitasking

Exercise 3.3.1: Async Channels

Channels are a very useful way to communicate between threads and async tasks. They allow for decoupling your application into many tasks. You'll see how that can come in nicely in exercise E.2. In this exercise, you'll implement two variants: a oneshot channel and a multi-producer-single-consumer (MPSC) channel. If you're up for a challenge, you can write a broadcast channel as well.

3.3.1.A MPSC channel ⭐⭐

A multi-producer-single-consumer (MPSC) channel is a channel that allows for multiple Senders to send many messages to a single Receiver.

Open exercises/3-multitasking/3-asynchronous-multitasking/1-async-channels in your editor. You'll find the scaffolding code there. For part A, you'll work in src/mpsc.rs. Fix the todo!s in that file in order to make the test pass. To test, run:

cargo test -- mpsc

If your tests are stuck, probably either your implementation does not use the Waker correctly, or it returns Poll::Pending where it shouldn't.

3.3.1.B Oneshot channel ⭐⭐⭐

A oneshot is a channel that allows for one Sender to send exactly one message to a single Receiver.

For part B, you'll work in src/broadcast.rs. This time, you'll have to do more yourself. Intended behavior:

  • Receiver implements Future. It returns Poll::Ready(Ok(T)) if inner.data is Some(T), Poll::Pending if inner.data is None, and Poll::Ready(Err(Error::SenderDropped)) if the Sender was dropped.
  • Receiver::poll replaces inner.waker with the one from the Context.
  • Sender consumes self on send, allowing the it to be used no more than once. Sending sets inner.data to Some(T). It returns Err(Error::ReceiverDropped(T)) if the Receiver was dropped before sending.
  • Sender::send wakes inner.waker after putting the data in inner.data
  • Once the Sender is dropped, it marks itself dropped with inner
  • Once the Receiver is dropped, it marks itself dropped with inner
  • Upon succesfully sending the message, the consumed Sender is not marked as dropped. Instead std::mem::forget is used to avoid running the destructor.

To test, run:

cargo test -- broadcast

3.3.1.C Broadcast channel (bonus) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Broadcast channel is a channel that supports multiple senders and receivers. Each message that is sent by any of the senders, is received by every receiver. Therefore, the implemenentation has to hold on to messages until they have been sent to every receiver that has not yet been dropped. This furthermore implies that the message shoud be cloned upon broadcasting.

For this bonus exercise, we provide no scaffolding. Take your inspiration from the mpsc and oneshot modules, and implement a broadcast module yourself.

Exercise 3.3.2: Async Chat

In this exercise, you'll write a simple chat server and client based on Tokio. Open exercises/3-multitasking/3-asynchronous-multitasking/2-async-chat in your editor. The project contains a lib.rs file, in which a type Message resides. This Message defines the data the chat server and clients use to communicate.

3.3.2.A Server ⭐⭐⭐

The chat server, which resides in src/bin/server.rs listens for incoming TCP connections on port 8000, and spawns two tasks (futures):

  • handle_incoming: reads lines coming in from the TCP connection. It reads the username the client provides, and broadcasts incoming Messages, possibly after some modification.
  • handle_outgoing: sends messages that were broadcasted by the handle_incoming tasks to the client over TCP.

Both handle_incoming and handle_outgoing contain a number to todos. Fix them.

To start the server, run

cargo run --bin server

3.3.2.B Client ⭐⭐

The chat client, residing in src/bin/client.rs contains some todo's as well. Fix them to allow for registration and sending Messages to the server.

To start the client, run

cargo run --bin client

If everything works well, you should be able to run multiple clients and see messages sent from each client in every other.