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the__alchemist 3 days ago  [ - ]

Here are some alternatives for concurrent operations in rust that don't use Async. Which are available depend on the target, e.g. embedded/low-level vs GPOS. I use all of these across my Rust projects:

  - Threads and thread pools
  - CPU SIMD
  - GPU
  - DMA, with memory and/or dedicated hardcore
  - Multiple cores, ICs, or MCUs
  - Hardware interrupts
  - Event loops
Most of you are already aware. I bring this up because I have observed that in the Rust OSS community (especially embedded) people sometimes refer to not using Async as blocking, and are not aware that Async isn't the only wya to manage concurrency. People new to it are learning it this way: "If you're not using Tokio or Embassy (Or some other executor), you are blocking a process."
tracker1 3 days ago  [ - ]

That's kind of wild... I'm relatively novice with Rust still, but I was pretty aware that the different executors weren't the only async option... I thought it was pretty cool you could opt into tokio for the bulk of async request work, but if I wanted to use a pool for specific workers, or something else on a more monolithic service/application, I could still launch my own threads for that use case pretty easily.

The hardest parts for me to grok really came down to lifetime memory management, for example a static/global dictionary as a cache, but being able to evict/recover entries from that dictionary for expired data... This is probably the use case that IMO is one of the least well documented, or at least lacking in discoverable tutorials etc.