Network Applications using Tokio and Rust

Rust is undeniably syntax-heavy. After all, there’s a lot of intent to express, and Rust wants you to be explicit. Still, Rust is a very elegant language. This might not be so obvious at first, as Rust has borrowed elements from a lot of precursors that help you navigating when you start, but can be false friends in the long run, resulting in bloated code, unnecessary complexity, and hard-to-use APIs.

In this workshop, we’re going to learn what Rust has to offer to create code that is a delight to read and follow, easy to use, and plays along nicely with all the other libraries out there.

We learn about:

• Asynchronous Rust in Depth
• Futures
• Async Runtimes
• Tokio Tasks
• Getting started with the Tokio runtime
• Using channels
  • Multi-producer, single-consumer
  • Broadcast
  • Oneshot
  • Watch
• Helper macros like select! and join!
• Tower and the Service trait
• Implementing services
• Hyper for correct HTTP implementations
• Using Tonic for gRPC based microservices
• Implementing apps with Axum
• Implementing apps with Warp

Each chapter concludes with tasks for the audience.

Target audience: People with familiarity in Rust and basic networking (TCP, HTTP; knowing what a web-server does).

Expected workshop duration: full-day, 2-day

Resources

• Websockets with Warp

  An example repo of using Websockets with Warp.

• Solutions to the Tokio chat exercises

  Solutions to the first exercises that evolve around a simple TCP chat

• TCP Chat

  The example TCP chat using Tokio

• Websockets with Axum

  Using Websockets with Axum (examples within the Axum repo)

• Video: Why the future of the cloud will be built on Rust

  Oliver Gould from Buoyant on why Rust is a better choice for their tasks than Go. Oliver created Linkerd based on Rust and shows which parts of the language and Tokio excite them most.

• Video: Tokio, Warp, and Websockets

  How to use Warp and Tokio to create a Websockets based chat

• Article: Inventing the Service trait

  Tokio’s motivation behind the Service trait in Tower

• Timeout Service written with tokio::select

  An example of how you can write the Timeout Service with Tower’s Service trait and tokio::select, instead of a ResponseFuture

Public presentations

• December 6, 2021 | Online, Worldwide Rust Summit
• October 28, 2021 | Online, Worldwide bettercode: Rust - Workshop