As Rust is known for “Fearless Concurrency”, that is being able to write concurrent, multi-threaded code without fear, it seemed like a good fit for a GStreamer element that we had to write at Centricular.

Previous experience with Rust for writing (mostly) single-threaded GStreamer elements and applications (also multi-threaded) were all quite successful and promising already. And in the end, this new element was also a pleasure to write and probably faster than doing the equivalent in C. For the impatient, the code, tests and a GTK+ example application (written with the great Rust GTK bindings, but the GStreamer element is also usable from C or any other language) can be found here.

What does it do?

The main idea of the element is that it basically works like the rec button on your tape recorder. There is a single boolean property called “record”, and whenever it is set to true it will pass-through data and whenever it is set to false it will drop all data. But different to the existing valve element, it

Outputs a contiguous timeline without gaps, i.e. there are no gaps in the output when not recording. Similar to the recording you get on a tape recorder, you don’t have 10s of silence if you didn’t record for 10s.

Handles and synchronizes multiple streams at once. When recording e.g. a video stream and an audio stream, every recorded segment starts and stops with both streams at the same time

Is key-frame aware. If you record a compressed video stream, each recorded segment starts at a keyframe and ends right before the next keyframe to make it most likely that all frames can be successfully decoded

The multi-threading aspect here comes from the fact that in GStreamer each stream usually has its own thread, so in this case the video stream and the audio stream(s) would come from different threads but would have to be synchronized between each other.

The GTK+ example application for the plugin is playing a video with the current playback time and a beep every second, and allows to record this as an MP4 file in the current directory.

How did it go?

This new element was again based on the Rust GStreamer bindings and the infrastructure that I was writing over the last year or two for writing GStreamer plugins in Rust.

As written above, it generally went all fine and was quite a pleasure but there were a few things that seem noteworthy. But first of all, writing this in Rust was much more convenient and fun than writing it in C would’ve been, and I’ve written enough similar code in C before. It would’ve taken quite a bit longer, I would’ve had to debug more problems in the new code during development (there were actually surprisingly few things going wrong during development, I expected more!), and probably would’ve written less exhaustive tests because writing tests in C is just so inconvenient.

Rust does not prevent deadlocks

While this should be clear, and was also clear to myself before, this seems like it might need some reiteration. Safe Rust prevents data races, but not all possible bugs that multi-threaded programs can have. Rust is not magic, only a tool that helps you prevent some classes of potential bugs.

For example, you can’t just stop thinking about lock order if multiple mutexes are involved, or that you can carelessly use condition variables without making sure that your conditions actually make sense and accessed atomically. As a wise man once said, “the safest program is the one that does not run at all”, and a deadlocking program is very close to that.

The part about condition variables might be something that can be improved in Rust. Without this, you can easily end up in situations where you wait forever or your conditions are actually inconsistent. Currently Rust’s condition variables only require a mutex to be passed to the functions for waiting for the condition to be notified, but it would probably also make sense to require passing the same mutex to the constructor and notify functions to make it absolutely clear that you need to ensure that your conditions are always accessed/modified while this specific mutex is locked. Otherwise you might end up in debugging hell.

Fortunately during development of the plugin I only ran into a simple deadlock, caused by accidentally keeping a mutex locked for too long and then running into conflict with another one. Which is probably an easy trap if the most common way of unlocking a mutex is to let the mutex lock guard fall out of scope. This makes it impossible to forget to unlock the mutex, but also makes it less explicit when it is unlocked and sometimes explicit unlocking by manually dropping the mutex lock guard is still necessary.

So in summary, while a big group of potential problems with multi-threaded programs are prevented by Rust, you still have to be careful to not run into any of the many others. Especially if you use lower-level constructs like condition variables, and not just e.g. channels. Everything is however far more convenient than doing the same in C, and with more support by the compiler, so I definitely prefer writing such code in Rust over doing the same in C.

Missing API

As usual, for the first dozen projects using a new library or new bindings to an existing library, you’ll notice some missing bits and pieces. That I missed relatively core part of GStreamer, the GstRegistry API, was surprising nonetheless. True, you usually don’t use it directly and I only need to use it here for loading the new plugin from a non-standard location, but it was still surprising. Let’s hope this was the biggest oversight. If you look at the issues page on GitHub, you’ll find a few other things that are still missing though. But nobody needed them yet, so it’s probably fine for the time being.

Another part of missing APIs that I noticed during development was that many manual (i.e. not auto-generated) bindings didn’t have the Debug trait implemented, or not in a too useful way. This is solved now, as otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to properly log what is happening inside the element to allow easier debugging later if something goes wrong.

Apart from that there were also various other smaller things that were missing, or bugs (see below) that I found in the bindings while going through all these. But those seem not very noteworthy – check the commit logs if you’re interested.

Bugs, bugs, bgsu

I also found a couple of bugs in the bindings. They can be broadly categorized in two categories

Annotation bugs in GStreamer. The auto-generated parts of the bindings are generated from an XML description of the API, that is generated from the C headers and code and annotations in there. There were a couple of annotations that were wrong (or missing) in GStreamer, which then caused memory leaks in my case. Such mistakes could also easily cause memory-safety issues though. The annotations are fixed now, which will also benefit all the other language bindings for GStreamer (and I’m not sure why nobody noticed the memory leaks there before me).

Bugs in the manually written parts of the bindings. Similarly to the above, there was one memory leak and another case where a function could’ve returned NULL but did not have this case covered on the Rust-side by returning an Option .

Generally I was quite happy with the lack of bugs though, the bindings are really ready for production at this point. And especially, all the bugs that I found are things that are unfortunately “normal” and common when writing code in C, while Rust is preventing exactly these classes of bugs. As such, they have to be solved only once at the bindings layer and then you’re free of them and you don’t have to spent any brain capacity on their existence anymore and can use your brain to solve the actual task at hand.

Inconvenient API

Similar to the missing API, whenever using some rather new API you will find things that are inconvenient and could ideally be done better. The biggest case here was the GstSegment API. A segment represents a (potentially open-ended) playback range and contains all the information to convert timestamps to the different time bases used in GStreamer. I’m not going to get into details here, best check the documentation for them.

A segment can be in different formats, e.g. in time or bytes. In the C API this is handled by storing the format inside the segment, and requiring you to pass the format together with the value to every function call, and internally there are some checks then that let the function fail if there is a format mismatch. In the previous version of the Rust segment API, this was done the same, and caused lots of unwrap() calls in this element.

But in Rust we can do better, and the new API for the segment now encodes the format in the type system (i.e. there is a Segment<Time>) and only values with the correct type (e.g. ClockTime) can be passed to the corresponding functions of the segment. In addition there is a type for a generic segment (which still has all the runtime checks) and functions to “cast” between the two.

Overall this gives more type-safety (the compiler already checks that you don’t mix calculations between seconds and bytes) and makes the API usage more convenient as various error conditions just can’t happen and thus don’t have to be handled. Or like in C, are simply ignored and not handled, potentially leaving a trap that can cause hard to debug bugs at a later time.

That Rust requires all errors to be handled makes it very obvious how many potential error cases the average C code out there is not handling at all, and also shows that a more expressive language than C can easily prevent many of these error cases at compile-time already.