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0 pointsshadowgovt8mo ago0 comments

It's not the runtime; it's how the borrow-checker interoperates with threads.

This is an aesthetics argument more than anything else, but I don't think the type theory around threads and memory safety in Rust is as "cooked" as single-thread borrow checking. The type assertions necessary around threads just get verbose and weird. I expect with more time (and maybe a new paradigm after we've all had more time to use Rust) this is a solvable problem, but I personally shy away from Rust for multi-threaded applications because I don't want to please the type-checker.

0 comments

pornel8mo ago

You know that Rust supports scoped threads? For the borrow checker, they behave like same-thread closures.

Borrow checking is orthogonal to threads.

You may be referring to the difficulty satisfying the 'static liftime (i.e. temporary references are not allowed when spawning a thread that may live for an arbitrarily long time).

If you just spawn an independent thread, there's no guarantee that your code will reach join(), so there's no guarantee that references won't be dangling. The scoped threads API catches panics and ensures the thread will always finish before references given to it expire.

shadowgovtOP8mo ago

I'll have to look more closely at scoped threads. What I'm referring to is that compared to the relatively simple syntax of declaring scopes for arguments to functions and return values to functions, the syntax when threads get involved is (to take an example from the Rust Book, Chapter 21):

  pub fn spawn<F, T>(f: F) -> JoinHandle<T>
      where
          F: FnOnce() -> T,
          F: Send + 'static,
          T: Send + 'static,

... yikes. This is getting into "As easy to read as a C++ template" territory.

steveklabnik8mo ago

The signature for scoped threads is both simpler and more complicated depending on how you look at it:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/thread/fn.scope.html

But really, that first type signature is not very complex. It can get far, far, far worse. That’s just what happens when you encode things in types.

(It reads as “spawn is a function that accepts a closure that returns a type T. It returns a JoinHandle that also wraps a T. Both the closure and the T must be able to be sent to another thread and have a static lifetime.”)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse