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pull/62/head
Daniel Carosone 5 years ago
parent 3df6c39e17
commit 5d7b641813

@ -10,9 +10,9 @@ Luckily, concurrent Rust already has two well-known and effective concepts abstr
As a quick summary:
* `Send` abstracts over *passing data* in a computation to another concurrent computation (let's call it the receiver), losing access to it on the sender side. In many programming languages, this strategy is commonly implemented, but missing support from the language side expects you to enforce the "losing access" behaviour yourself. This is a regular source of bugs: senders keeping handles to sent things around and maybe even working with them after sending. Rust mitigates this problem by making this behaviour known. Types can be `Send` or not (by implementing the appropriate marker trait), allowing or disallowing sending them around, and the ownership and borrowing rules prevent subsequent access.
- `Send` abstracts over *passing data* in a computation to another concurrent computation (let's call it the receiver), losing access to it on the sender side. In many programming languages, this strategy is commonly implemented, but missing support from the language side expects you to enforce the "losing access" behaviour yourself. This is a regular source of bugs: senders keeping handles to sent things around and maybe even working with them after sending. Rust mitigates this problem by making this behaviour known. Types can be `Send` or not (by implementing the appropriate marker trait), allowing or disallowing sending them around, and the ownership and borrowing rules prevent subsequent access.
* `Sync` is about *sharing data* between two concurrent parts of a program. This is another common pattern: as writing to a memory location or reading while another party is writing is inherently unsafe, this access needs to be moderated through synchronisation.[^1] There are many common ways for two parties to agree on not using the same part in memory at the same time, for example mutexes and spinlocks. Again, Rust gives you the option of (safely!) not caring. Rust gives you the ability to express that something *needs* synchronisation while not being specific about the *how*.
- `Sync` is about *sharing data* between two concurrent parts of a program. This is another common pattern: as writing to a memory location or reading while another party is writing is inherently unsafe, this access needs to be moderated through synchronisation.[^1] There are many common ways for two parties to agree on not using the same part in memory at the same time, for example mutexes and spinlocks. Again, Rust gives you the option of (safely!) not caring. Rust gives you the ability to express that something *needs* synchronisation while not being specific about the *how*.
Note how we avoided any word like *"thread"*, but instead opted for "computation". The full power of `Send` and `Sync` is that they relieve you of the burden of knowing *what* shares. At the point of implementation, you only need to know which method of sharing is appropriate for the type at hand. This keeps reasoning local and is not influenced by whatever implementation the user of that type later uses.

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