Async: How to Use It in a File System API

Three more interviews from RustFest 2019: Jake Shadle on using Rust for high-performance game engines at Embark, applying lessons learned from working on EA DICE’s Frostbite engine; Yoshua Wuyts on async-std and Rust’s async ecosystem; and Stjepan Glavina on crossbeam, Rust’s foundational library for powerful concurrency primitives.

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Timestamps & referenced resources

[@00:00] Part 1: Game Development @ Embark Studios w/ Jake Shadle

• [@01:25] - What is yours (and Embark’s) background in game development?
• [@02:14] - What is the relevance of the Frostbite engine and what is your experience with it?
• [@04:15] - What makes you think that Rust as a language is suitable for game development?
• [@06:13] - How is parallelism employed in a game engine on the scale of Frostbite?
• [@07:07] - Where is the Rust library ecosystem lacking for your use case, and what crates are you making use of?
• [@11:13] - Why is Embark interested in WebAssembly?
• [@14:20] - How can someone get in touch or learn more about Embark?
  • embark.dev
  • Inside Rust at Embark

[@15:09] Part 2: async-std w/ Yoshua Wuyts

• [@15:48] - How much of the Rust standard library is async-std intended to emulate?
• [@17:12] - Is there anything from async-std that ought to be upstreamed into the standard library?
• [@19:20] - Does async-std run into any conflicts with the types or traits defined in futures-rs or the standard library?
• [@22:21] - How complete or incomplete is Rust’s async ecosystem and async language support?
  • async-trait: a procedural macro for providing async trait methods on stable Rust
• [@26:21] - How close is async-std to being a drop-in replacement for the standard library?
• [@28:32] - What’s next for the development of async-std?
• [@30:07] - With the advent of async-std version 1.0, what would an eventual 2.0 release look like?
• [@32:09] - Who is using async-std?
• [@32:54] - How can someone get in touch or get involved?
  • async.rs
  • github.com/async-rs

[@34:02] Part 3: crossbeam w/ Stjepan Glavina

• [@34:29] - What is crossbeam and what is its history?
• [@36:41] - What is epoch-based garbage collection, and why would a Rust user want to use it?
• [@38:17] - How does epoch-based garbage collection compare to std::sync::Arc?
• [@41:30] - What is your background in concurrent programming?
• [@42:59] - How do crossbeam’s channels compare to those in the standard library?
• [@44:33] - How much research was involved in writing crossbeam?
• [@45:35] - Do crossbeam’s channels provide a selection interface?
• [@46:34] - What other primitives does crossbeam provide?
• [@48:37] - How confident are you in the correctness of crossbeam’s implementation?
• [@49:46] - How is crossbeam related to rayon and async-std?
• [@51:53] - What’s next for crossbeam?

Credits

Intro Theme: Aerocity

Audio Editing: Zoran Zaric

Hosting Infrastructure: Jon Gjengset

Show Notes: Ben Striegel, Zoran Zaric

Hosts: Ben Striegel