async_executors

Abstract over different executors.

async_executors aims to help you write executor agnostic libraries. We express common executor functionality in traits and implement it for the most used executors. This way libraries can require the exact functionality they need and client code can use any executor they choose as long as it can provide the required functionality.

Available traits are grouped in the iface module. We also implement Spawn and/or LocalSpawn traits from futures.

All supported executors are turned on with features, see below.

Table of Contents

• Install
  • Upgrade
  • Dependencies
  • Security
• Features
  • General Features
  • Executor Specific
• Usage
  • Basic Example
  • API
• Contributing
  • Code of Conduct
• License

Install

With cargo add: cargo add async_executors

With cargo yaml:

dependencies:

   async_executors: ^0.7

With Cargo.toml

[dependencies]

    async_executors = "0.7"

Upgrade

Please check out the changelog when upgrading.

Dependencies

This crate has few dependencies. Cargo will automatically handle it's dependencies for you.

The only hard dependencies are futures-task and futures-util. The rest are the optional dependencies to turn on support for each executor.

Features

This crate has a lot of features. Lets go over them:

General features

• tracing: when enabled, all traits are re-implemented for tracing-futures::Instrumented and tracing-futures::WithDispatch.
• timer : Turns on the futures-timer crate. This enables executors to async sleep. On tokio, alternatively you can enable tokio_timer to enable the tokio native timer. async_std, when not on wasm, provides a timer without needing this feature.

Executor specific:

• async_global : Turns on the executor from async-global-executor. Supports Wasm, !Send tasks.
• async_global_tokio: Makes sure a tokio reactor is running for tasks spawned on AsyncGlobal. AsyncGlobal will implement the TokioIo trait.
• async_std : Turns on the executor from the async-std crate. Supports Wasm and !Send tasks.
• async_std_tokio : Makes sure a tokio reactor is running for tasks spawned on AsyncStd. AsyncStd will implement the TokioIo trait.
• glommio : Turns on the executor from the glommio crate. Single threaded, Linux 5.8+ only. Supports !Send tasks.
• tokio_ct : Tokio Current thread, enables a single threaded runtime from the tokio crate. Supports !Send tasks.
• tokio_tp : Tokio threadpool, enables a threadpool runtime from the tokio crate.
• tokio_timer : Will enable the time feature on tokio and call enable_time() on any tokio runtimes you create. For tokio runtimes, this takes precedence over the timer feature.
• tokio_io : Will enable the net and process features on tokio and call enable_reactor() on any tokio runtimes you create. TokioCt and TokioTp will implement the TokioIo trait.
• localpool : Enables the single threaded executor from futures-executor. Supports !Send tasks. LocalPool and LocalSpawner will be re-exported from this crate and have our traits implemented.
• threadpool : Enables the treadpool executor from futures-executor. ThreadPool will be re-exported from this crate and have our traits implemented.
• bindgen : Enables the single threaded executor from wasm-bindgen-futures. Wasm only. Supports !Send tasks.

Security

The crate itself uses #[ forbid(unsafe_code) ].

Our dependencies use unsafe.

Performance

Most wrappers are very thin but the Spawn and LocalSpawn traits do imply boxing the future. With executors boxing futures to put them in a queue you probably get 2 heap allocations per spawn.

JoinHandle uses the native JoinHandle types from tokio and async-std to avoid the overhead from RemoteHandle, but for async-std, wrap the future in Abortable to create consistent behavior across all executors. The JoinHandle provided cancels it's future on drop unless you call detach on it.

SpawnHandle and LocalSpawnHandle require boxing the future twice, just like Spawn and LocalSpawn.

Existing benchmarks for all executors can be found in executor_benchmarks.

Usage

For API providers

When writing a library that needs to spawn, you probably shouldn't lock your clients into one framework or another. It's usually not appropriate to setup your own thread pool for spawning futures. It belongs to the application developer to decide where futures are spawned and it might not be appreciated if libraries bring in extra dependencies on a framework.

In order to get round this you can take an executor in as a parameter from client code and spawn your futures on the provided executor. Currently the only two traits that are kind of widely available for this are Spawn and LocalSpawn from the futures library. Unfortunately, other executor providers do not implement these traits. So by publishing an API that relies on these traits, you would have been restricting the clients to use the executors from futures, or start implementing their own wrappers that implement the traits.

Async_executors has wrappers providing impls on various executors, namely tokio, async_std, wasm_bindgen, ... As such you can just use the trait bounds and refer your users to this crate if they want to use any of the supported executors.

All wrappers also implement Clone, Debug and the zero sized ones also Copy. You can express you will need to clone in your API: impl Spawn + Clone.

Note that you should never use block_on inside async contexts. Depending on the executor, this might hang or panic. Some backends we use like tokio and RemoteHandle from futures use catch_unwind, so try to keep futures unwind safe.

Spawning with handles

You can use the SpawnHandle and LocalSpawnHandle traits as bounds for obtaining join handles.

Example

use
{
  async_executors :: { JoinHandle, SpawnHandle, SpawnHandleExt       } ,
  std             :: { sync::Arc                                     } ,
  futures         :: { FutureExt, executor::{ ThreadPool, block_on } } ,
};


// Example of a library function that needs an executor. Just use impl Trait.
//
fn needs_exec( exec: impl SpawnHandle<()> )
{
   let handle = exec.spawn_handle( async {} );
}


// A type that needs to hold on to an executor during it's lifetime. Here it
// must be heap allocated.
//
struct SomeObj{ exec: Arc< dyn SpawnHandle<u8> > }


impl SomeObj
{
   pub fn new( exec: Arc< dyn SpawnHandle<u8> > ) -> SomeObj
   {
      SomeObj{ exec }
   }

   fn run( &self ) -> JoinHandle<u8>
   {
      self.exec.spawn_handle( async{ 5 } ).expect( "spawn" )
   }
}


fn main()
{
  let exec = ThreadPool::new().expect( "build threadpool" );
  let obj  = SomeObj::new( Arc::new(exec) );

  let x = block_on( obj.run() );

  assert_eq!( x, 5 );
}

As you can see from the above example, the output of the future is a type parameter on SpawnHandle. This is necessary because putting it on the method would make the trait no longer object safe, which means it couldn't be stored unless as a type parameter.

The best way to define a combination of abilities you need is by making your own trait alias (here shown with a macro from the trait_set crate, but you can write it out yourself with a blanket implementation if you want):

use async_executors::*;

trait_set::trait_set!
{
   pub trait LibExec = SpawnHandle<()> + SpawnHandle<u8> + Timer + YieldNow + Clone;
}

pub fn lib_function( _exec: impl LibExec ) {}

All implementers of SpawnHandle must support any output type. Thus adding more SpawnHandle bounds to LibExec should not be a breaking change.

For API consumers

You can basically pass the wrapper types provided in async_executors to API's that take any of the following. Traits are also implemented for Rc, Arc, &, &mut, Box and Instrumented and WithDispatch from tracing-futures wrappers:

• impl Spawn
• impl LocalSpawn
• impl SpawnHandle<T>
• impl LocalSpawnHandle<T>
• impl SpawnBlocking
• impl YieldNow
• impl Timer
• impl TokioIo

All wrappers also implement Clone, Debug and the zero sized ones also Copy.

Some executors are a bit special, so make sure to check the API docs for the one you intend to use. Some also provide extra methods like block_on which will call a framework specific block_on rather than the one from futures.

Example

use
{
  async_executors :: { AsyncStd, SpawnHandle, TokioTp } ,
  std             :: { convert::TryFrom               } ,
};

fn needs_exec( exec: impl SpawnHandle<()> + SpawnHandle<String> ){};

// AsyncStd is zero sized, so it's easy to instantiate.
//
needs_exec( AsyncStd );

// We need a builder type for tokio, as we guarantee by the type of TokioTp that it
// will be a threadpool.
//
let tp = TokioTp::new().expect( "build threadpool" );

needs_exec( tp );

For more examples, check out the examples directory. If you want to get a more polished API for adhering to structured concurrency, check out async_nursery.

API

API documentation can be found on docs.rs.

Contributing

Please check out the contribution guidelines.

Testing

Run ci/test.bash and ci/wasm.bash to run all tests.

Code of conduct

Any of the behaviors described in point 4 "Unacceptable Behavior" of the Citizens Code of Conduct are not welcome here and might get you banned. If anyone including maintainers and moderators of the project fail to respect these/your limits, you are entitled to call them out.

License

Unlicence