Crust of Rust: Channels
Channel: Jon Gjengset
Date: 2020-08-06

In this (fifth) Crust of Rust video, we cover multi-produce/single-consumer (mpsc) channels, by re-implementing some of the std::sync::mpsc types from the standard library. As part of that, we cover what channels are used for, how they work at a high level, different common channel variants, and common channel implementations. In the process, we go over some common Rust concurrency primitives like Mutex and Condvar.

This is a rich topic, and I highly recommend you go and try to read the crossbeam-channel or flume source code if you're hungry for more! Please also leave questions here or on Discord if you're confused, and I'll try to help explain what's going on.

You can find the final code at https://gist.github.com/jonhoo/935060885d0d832d463fda3c89e8259d and the Discord at https://discord.gg/RJdqQ9n

0:00:00 Introduction
0:08:20 Initial structure
0:14:27 Structure Q&A
0:19:20 send and recv
0:29:03 send/recv Q&A
0:34:36 Does it work?
0:40:28 Zero senders
0:46:27 Q&A
0:50:53 Why does it hang?
0:53:08 Implementation Q&A
0:58:37 Synchronous channels
1:05:55 Batch recv optimization
1:13:23 Channel flavors
1:18:48 Flavor Q&A
1:22:32 Other implementations
1:32:24 Future-aware channels
1:36:27 Where next?
1:38:24 Channels Q&A

You can find crossbeam-channel at https://github.com/crossbeam-rs/crossbeam/tree/master/crossbeam-channel, and flume at https://github.com/zesterer/flume/.

You can watch the live version with comments at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBUKsFIUKw