What this book covers
Chapter 1, Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming: A Detailed Overview, provides a short history leading up to the type of asynchronous programming we use today. We give several important definitions and provide a mental model that explains what kind of problems asynchronous programming really solves, and how concurrency differs from parallelism. We also cover the importance of choosing the correct reference frame when discussing asynchronous program flow, and we go through several important and fundamental concepts about CPUs, operating systems, hardware, interrupts, and I/O.
Chapter 2, How Programming Languages Model Asynchronous Program Flow, narrows the scope from the previous chapter and focuses on the different ways programming languages deal with asynchronous programming. It starts by giving several important definitions before explaining stackful and stackless coroutines, OS threads, green threads, fibers, callbacks, promises, futures, and async/await.
Chapter 3, Understanding OS-Backed Event Queues, System Calls, and Cross-Platform Abstractions, explains what epoll, kqueue, and IOCP are and how they differ. It prepares us for the next chapters by giving an introduction to syscalls, FFI, and cross-platform abstractions.
Chapter 4, Create Your Own Event Queue, is the chapter where you create your own event queue that mimics the API of mio (the popular Rust library that underpins much of the current async ecosystem). The example will center around epoll and go into quite a bit of detail on how it works.
Chapter 5, Creating Our Own Fibers, walks through an example where we create our own kind of stackful coroutines called fibers. They’re the same kind of green threads that Go uses and show one of the most widespread and popular alternatives to the type of abstraction Rust uses with futures and async/await today. Rust used this kind of abstraction in its early days before it reached 1.0, so it’s also a part of Rust’s history. This chapter will also cover quite a few general programming concepts, such as stacks, assembly, Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs), and instruction set architecture (ISAs), that are useful beyond the context of asynchronous programming as well.
Chapter 6, Futures in Rust, gives a short introduction and overview of futures, runtimes, and asynchronous programming in Rust.
Chapter 7, Coroutines and async/await, is a chapter where you write your own coroutines that are simplified versions of the ones created by async/await in Rust today. We’ll write a few of them by hand and introduce a new syntax that allows us to programmatically rewrite what look like regular functions into the coroutines we wrote by hand.
Chapter 8, Runtimes, Wakers, and the Reactor-Executor Pattern, introduces runtimes and runtime design. By iterating on the example we created in Chapter 7, we’ll create a runtime for our coroutines that we’ll gradually improve. We’ll also do some experiments with our runtime once it’s done to better understand how it works.
Chapter 9, Coroutines, Self-Referential Structs, and Pinning, is the chapter where we introduce self-referential structs and pinning in Rust. By improving our coroutines further, we’ll experience first-hand why we need something such as Pin, and how it helps us solve the problems we encounter.
Chapter 10, Create Your Own Runtime, is the chapter where we finally put all the pieces together. We’ll improve the same example from the previous chapters further so we can run Rust futures, which will allow us to use the full power of async/await and asynchronous Rust. We’ll also do a few experiments that show some of the difficulties with asynchronous Rust and how we can best solve them.
