Announcing Tokio

A Finagle inspired network application framework for Rust.

I’m very excited to announce a project that has been a long time in the making. Tokio is a network application framework for rapid development and highly scalable deployments of clients and servers in the Rust programming language.

It strives to make writing robust, scalable, and production ready network clients and servers as easy as possible. It does this by focusing on small and reusable components… and by being really, really, fast.

Go check it out https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio. I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Let’s start our tour of Tokio.

Service Trait

Writing composable and reusable components is made possible by standardizing the interface that clients and servers use. In Tokio, this standardized interface is the `Service` trait and it is the cornerstone of Tokio’s building blocks. This trait is heavily inspired (Ok, stolen) from Finagle.

Here is what the Service trait looks like:

A relatively simple trait, but it unlocks a world of possibility. This symmetric and uniform API reduces your server or client into a function, thus enabling middleware (or filters, depending on your lingo).

A Service is an asynchronous function from Request to Response, where asynchronicity is managed by the brilliant Futures crate.

A middleware is a component that acts both as a client and a server. It intercepts a request, modifies it, and passes it on to an upstream Service value.

Let us use timeouts as an example, something every network application requires.

This Timeout middleware, shown above, only has to be written once, then it can be inserted as part of any network client for any protocol, as shown below.

Now, the really interesting thing is that the exact same middleware could be used in a server as well, shown below.

Tokio’s Reactor

The Service trait addresses how all the various network services fit together to build one cohesive application, but it doesn’t care about the details of how each service is built. This is where the Tokio reactor fits in.

The Tokio reactor is a non-blocking runtime built on top of Mio. It has the job of scheduling tasks to run based on readiness notifications of the underlying sockets.

Let us start with a simple example: listening on a socket and accepting inbound connections.

Look at all the things that I’m not doing. This is all non-blocking code. There is no interest explicitly registered with the reactor, there are no callbacks passed around, everything happens right there in the `tick` function.

This is where I think Tokio does something new and interesting (if this has been done before, I am not aware of it).

Instead of requiring that you explicitly register interest in a socket in order to receive readiness notifications, as Mio requires, Tokio observes which sources (in this case, a TcpListener) the task depends on by noticing which sources the task uses. In other words, by simply using your sockets, timers, channels, etc… you are expressing readiness interest to the reactor.

So, in this example, the first time the reactor calls the Listener task, `self.socket.accept()` will return `Ok(None)` which indicates that the listener socket is not ready to complete the accept operation. However, the listener socket will also register interest in itself with the reactor. When the listener becomes ready, the task is invoked again by the reactor. This time the accept will succeed. The reactor is able to make its observations with virtually no performance overhead. You can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.

This pattern works out nicely for more complex cases as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

Community

Tokio is now open to the world while still at a very early stage. This is intentional. Release early, release often. I am hoping to get the Rust community involved now to shape the direction of Tokio and to get the protocol & middleware ecosystem jump started. It is up to you to build these reusable components and share them.

Do you want a Cassandra driver? Write it. Do you want an HTTP 2 server? Do it!

A number of Rust community members have already jumped in to help shape Tokio to what it is today.

Sean McArthur of Hyper has already started working to integrate the Tokio reactor in Hyper for the 0.10 release. His feedback has been invaluable. We already have a proof of concept HTTP server providing a Service trait based API.

Tikue is working on getting his RPC framework Tarpc working on Tokio using the provided building blocks. We’ve already discovered further components Tokio could provide to reduce the amount of time he has to spend writing networking code.

This is the beginning, not the end. There is still so much to do and I hope that we can all do it together. If you want to build something with Tokio, get involved. Talk to me and the other members of the Tokio community. Jump in Gitter and start a conversation. Let’s build this together.