The Rust Programming Language

Interestingly, the Rust language itself knows very little about concurrency. Almost everything we’ve talked about so far in this chapter has been part of the standard library, not the language. Our concurrency options are not limited to the language or the standard library, meaning we can write our own concurrency options or use ones others have written.

There are two concurrency concepts embedded in the language, however: the std::marker traits Sync and Send.

The Send marker trait indicates that ownership of the type implementing Send may be transferred between threads. Almost every Rust type is Send, but there are some exceptions, including Rc<T>: this cannot be Send because if we cloned an Rc<T> value and tried to transfer ownership of the clone to another thread, both threads might update the reference count at the same time. For this reason, Rc<T> is implemented for use in single-threaded situations where you don’t want to pay the threadsafe performance penalty.

In this way Rust’s type system and trait bounds ensure we can never accidentally send an Rc<T> value across threads unsafely. When we tried to do this in Listing 16-14, we got an error that said the trait Send is not implemented for Rc<Mutex<i32>>. When we switched to Arc<T>, which is Send, the code compiled.

Any type composed entirely of Send types is automatically marked as Send as well. Almost all primitive types are Send, aside from raw pointers, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 19.

The Sync marker trait indicates that it is safe for the type implementing Sync to be referenced from multiple threads. Another way to say this is that any type T is Sync if &T (a reference to T) is Send, meaning the reference can be sent safely to another thread. In a similar manner as Send, primitive types are Sync and types composed entirely of types that are Sync are also Sync.

Rc<T> is also not Sync, for the same reasons that it’s not Send. RefCell<T> (which we talked about in Chapter 15) and the family of related Cell<T> types are not Sync. The implementation of borrow checking that RefCell<T> does at runtime is not threadsafe. Mutex<T> is Sync, and can be used to share access with multiple threads as we saw in the previous section.

Because types that are made up of Send and Sync traits are automatically also Send and Sync, we don’t have to implement those traits ourselves. As marker traits, they don’t even have any methods to implement. They’re just useful for enforcing concurrency-related invariants.

Manually implementing these traits involves implementing unsafe Rust code. We’re going to be talking about using unsafe Rust code in Chapter 19; for now, the important information is that building new concurrent types not made up of Send and Sync parts requires careful thought, in order to uphold the safety guarantees. The Nomicon has more information about these guarantees and how to uphold them.

This isn’t the last we’ll see of concurrency in this book; the project in Chapter 20 will use these concepts in a more realistic situation than the smaller examples discussed here.

As we mentioned, since very little of how Rust deals with concurrency is part of the language, many concurrency solutions are implemented as crates. These evolve more quickly than the standard library; search online for the current state-of-the-art crates to use in multithreaded situations.

Rust provides channels for message passing and smart pointer types like Mutex<T> and Arc<T> that are safe to use in concurrent contexts. The type system and the borrow checker will make sure the code using these solutions won’t end up with data races or invalid references. Once we get our code compiling, we can rest assured that it will happily run on multiple threads without the kinds of hard-to-track-down bugs common in other languages. Concurrent programming is no longer something to be afraid of: go forth and make your programs concurrent, fearlessly!

Next, let’s talk about idiomatic ways to model problems and structure solutions as your Rust programs get bigger, and how Rust’s idioms relate to those you might be familiar with from Object Oriented Programming.