In this post, I’m going to take a critical look at channels in Rust’s standard library and present multiple issues I have with it.

Before starting, I should note that there are good reasons why the channels are designed the way they are. Some of them boil down to the minimalistic philosophy of the standard library, some have to do with Rust’s history, and some are simply “nobody has done it better yet”.

Finally, I’ll try to rethink the channel API and design one that is cleaner and more flexible. That will be a channel that might or might not be a good fit for the standard library, but in any case would certainly work well as an addition to Crossbeam.

How to actually implement that API will be a topic for another post.

A look at Go’s channels

Recently I’ve been fiddling with Go and digging into the internals of its channel implementation. Channels are the most important feature of Go - in fact, there isn’t much to Go other than channels and goroutines!

To illustrate what its channels can do, consider the following function:

func Match ( name string , c chan string ) { select { case peer := <- c : fmt . Printf ( "%s received a message from %s.

" , name , peer ) case c <- name : // Wait for someone to receive my message. } }

Here we select over two operations:

Receive a message from channel c . Send name through channel c .

The program blocks until one of the operations succeeds. It’s also important to say that exactly one operation will succeed. In particular, it is not possible for these two operations to pair up - the first case cannot receive name from the second case.

Selection allows for very flexible and composable synchronization. I think Go’s channels are great, and in a way, they’re definitely an ideal for channels in other languages to strive towards.

One of the most common criticisms, however, is that Go’s channels are slow. And, indeed, they are not terribly performant. It’s extremely difficult to implement a channel that is any faster but still just as powerful.

All that said, this post doesn’t really aim to compare Go and Rust. I’m intentionally pointing out the good parts of Go’s channels only, but they do come with a series of their own warts, which I won’t be analyzing here.

With that in mind, let’s now turn to Rust…

Problems with Rust’s channels

Rust has channels in the standard library within the std::sync::mpsc module.

Although the rest of the post will be very critical, my opinion is that they’re generally well designed. For example, I quite like how disconnection works: as soon as all senders or all receivers get dropped, the channel is disconnected. Neat.

But… Rust’s channels also come with several oddities. Here’s one:

Problem #1: There is no send_timeout method.

Receiver has a blocking method recv_timeout that simply times out after a specified period instead of blocking forever. It would make perfect sense for SyncSender to have a similarly named method send_timeout , blocking while the channel is full.

But this method doesn’t exist. Why? I honestly don’t know.

Problem #2: Sender should implement Sync , but doesn’t.

A rather common annoyance with channels is that senders can’t be simply shared by reference among multiple threads. They have to be cloned instead.

But that is not always good enough. For example, in hyper (a HTTP library) the following is a common idiom:

let ( tx , rx ) = channel (); Server :: http ( addr ) .listen ( move | req , res | { tx .send ( "request!" ); // tx does not implement Sync });

This doesn’t compile because tx cannot be shared among multiple threads. The obvious, but also a slow and unpleasant solution would be:

let ( tx , rx ) = channel (); let tx = Mutex :: new ( tx ); Server :: http ( addr ) .listen ( move | req , res | { tx .lock () .unwrap () .send ( "request!" ); });

If Sender implemented Sync , however, this problem would be trivially solved.

In nightly Rust (as of PR #42397) that snippet would work if we used sync_channel instead of channel . So the good news is that SyncSender now implements Sync .

But why doesn’t Sender implement Sync as well? Alex Crichton, one of the main authors of Rust’s channels, states:

It’s a real bummer that Sender isn’t Sync. It should be basically!

So yes, Sender should implement Sync , but it doesn’t, and the reason is that it’s very difficult to make the current implementation thread-safe. That’s just unfortunate, but it is what it is.

Problem #3: Bounded channels are slow.

Channels in Rust are often praised for good performance. That’s part true, part false.

Unbounded channels are great - they’re performant and highly concurrent. The implementation keeps track of the number of Senders and counts the number of messages sent, and then uses one of the three variants, dynamically switching between them as needed:

Oneshot variant: when the sender wasn’t cloned, and at most one message has been sent. Single-sender variant: when the sender wasn’t cloned, but at least two messages have been sent. Multi-sender variant: when the sender was cloned.

This means that the channel dynamically adapts to different workloads by switching the underlying structure. Moreover, these implementations use mostly-lock-free algorithms, which makes them pretty fast. Fantastic!

But this optimization is not a free lunch: dynamic switching between variants is exactly what prevents Sender from implementing Sync . It’s very difficult to make all this machinery thread-safe. In other words, the tradeoff is between performance and ergonomics, and in this case, we get performance.

Bounded channels, on the other hand, are essentially just a Mutex<VecDeque<T>> and a Condvar . In my benchmarks, they are even slower than Go’s channels, which are often criticized for bad performance. Bounded channels don’t come with any cool optimization tricks.

A bit of trivia: Rust used to have fast mostly-lock-free bounded queues in the standard library in the pre-1.0 era. But those were just primitive queues, not channels. The difficult part is how to add channel-like features to a queue (blocking operations, selection, etc.).

To summarize: unbounded channels are fast, and bounded channels are slow.

Problem #4: Sender and SyncSender are distinct types, but they don’t have to be.

Channels can be constructed using the following two functions:

fn channel < T > ( cap : usize ) -> ( Sender < T > , Receiver < T > ); fn sync_channel < T > ( cap : usize ) -> ( SyncSender < T > , Receiver < T > );

It’s a bit peculiar how the return types share Receiver , but at the same time, Sender and SyncSender are split into two distinct types. Why is that so?

I don’t know the answer to that question since the split is completely unnecessary. Both kinds of senders could be conflated to the same type without any problems.

In fact, this works very well for the chan crate. One might argue that Sender and SyncSender are different enough to deserve the split (one is asynchronous and the other is synchronous), but I’m not convinced.

I think the price of lost ergonomics is higher than whatever gains we might get from having the split.

Problem #5: Selection doesn’t support send operations.

Rust has the unstable select! macro, but it can only select among multiple receive operations. Sends are not supported. This fact alone already makes channels comparatively much less powerful than Go’s channels.

The example presented in the first part simply isn’t possible to express using Rust’s channels.

Problem #6: select! is informally deprecated.

In issue #12902 a wart in the select! macro was reported, but the issue was closed and won’t be fixed. Alex finishes the discussion with:

The select! macro is sort of defacto deprecated nowadays in the sense that “selection over a number of events” is best done with the futures crate outside the standard library.

Problem #7: Dynamic selection is unsafe and unergonomic.

There’s another way of selecting over multiple channel operations: by using the Select struct. This is more powerful than select! because it allows us to arbitrarily choose the set of cases during runtime, rather than enumerating a fixed set of cases in a macro.

In other words, Select is dynamic, while select! is static.

The main problem with Select is that it’s not pretty to use - just look at this simplified snippet from Servo:

let mut event = { let sel = Select :: new (); let mut script_port = sel .handle ( & self .port ); let mut control_port = sel .handle ( & self .control_port ); unsafe { script_port .add (); control_port .add (); } let ret = sel .wait (); if ret == script_port .id () { FromScript ( self .port .recv () .unwrap ()) } else if ret == control_port .id () { FromConstellation ( self .control_port .recv () .unwrap ()) } else { panic! ( "unexpected select result" ) } };

The API is even unsafe! And due to all the repetition, it’s easy to accidentally get it wrong.

I get the impression that channel selection in Rust is stuck in the wrong direction. It does work… mostly, but also doesn’t seem like the right solution. We can probably do better than that.

Selection almost certainly won’t be stabilized and is likely to be deprecated. Perhaps even removed?

Commonly suggested alternatives that do support selection are chan and Tokio. The problem with chan is that it’s very inefficient - performance is explicitly a non-goal. And Tokio, while a good solution, is simply not a drop-in replacement.

The ideal channel

I’ve been thinking about the design and implementation of channels for a long time, refusing to accept the compromises it has made. There must be a better way to design and implement channels!

So let’s take a step back, start from scratch, and ask the following question: What would our ideal channel look like? For the moment, let’s be a bit optimistic and assume that implementation issues are not of much concern.

I’d like to present an API for my “perfect” channel. It probably won’t be a good fit for the standard library to replace std::sync::mpsc , but might be a nice addition to Crossbeam.

First of all, I don’t like the synchronous/asynchronous terminology, and would much prefer bounded/unbounded, which I think feels less confusing. Secondly, I think Sender and SyncSender should really be the same type.

Let’s start with channel construction, which might look like this:

fn unbounded < T > () -> ( Sender < T > , Receiver < T > ); fn bounded < T > ( cap : usize ) -> ( Sender < T > , Receiver < T > );

So far so good.

Next up is the interface for Sender and Receiver :

struct Sender < T > { ... } struct Receiver < T > { ... } impl < T > Sender < T > { fn try_send ( & self , value : T ) -> Result < (), TrySendError < T >> ; fn send ( & self , value : T ) -> Result < (), SendError < T >> ; fn send_timeout ( & self , value : T , dur : Duration ) -> Result < (), SendTimeoutError < T >> ; } impl < T > Receiver < T > { fn try_recv ( & self ) -> Result < T , TryRecvError > ; fn recv ( & self ) -> Result < T , RecvError > ; fn recv_timeout ( & self , dur : Duration ) -> Result < T , RecvTimeoutError > ; } impl < T > Clone for Sender < T > { ... } impl < T > Clone for Receiver < T > { ... } unsafe impl < T : Send > Send for Sender < T > {} unsafe impl < T : Send > Sync for Sender < T > {} unsafe impl < T : Send > Send for Receiver < T > {} unsafe impl < T : Send > Sync for Receiver < T > {}

Note how symmetrical and simple Sender and Receiver are: both have a triple of try_X / X / X_timeout methods.

Moreover, both Sender and Receiver are cloneable and implement Send and Sync . This makes the channel an MPMC (multi-producer multi-consumer).

Sharing channels among multiple threads is very easy and unintrusive. If you want to clone senders and receivers to share - that’s okay, and if you want to share by reference - that’s also okay. Your choice!

Obviously, now that we have multiple receivers, this means that we’ll have to use Crossbeam to take care of concurrent memory deallocation.

Finally, performance is paramount: wrapping the guts of a channel in a mutex is a non-starter. There are ways to implement concurrent queues using atomic operations, and we shouldn’t accept anything less than that. Preferably, I’d like the unbounded variant to be as fast as std::sync::mpsc::channel and bounded variant to be much faster than std::sync::mpsc::sync_channel .

The ideal select

Regarding selection, I’m going to immediately impose three difficult constraints:

Both send and receive operations must be supported. Scratch hacky macros - selection must always be dynamic. The API must be safe.

I’ve spent a long time pondering what would an API satisfying these constraints even look like, let alone how would one go about implementing it. And in the end this is what I came up with:

impl < T > Sender < T > { fn select ( & self , value : T ) -> Result < (), T > ; } impl < T > Receiver < T > { fn select ( & self ) -> Result < T , () > ; }

Both ends of the channel come with select methods. They are in fact very similar to try_send and try_recv .

To show what exactly these methods do, let’s jump straight to reimplementing the Match function from the introductory Go example.

fn match ( mut name : String , tx : & Sender < String > , rx : & Receiver < String > ) { loop { if let Ok ( peer ) = rx .select () { println! ( "{} received a message from {}." , name , peer ); break ; } if let Err ( s ) = tx .select ( name ) { name = s ; } else { // Wait for someone to receive my message. break ; } } }

Ok, what’s going on here? Why do we have a loop here?

It’s best to think of select methods as magical equivalents to try_send and try_recv . We don’t have to explicitly mark the beginning of selection - that is automatic. Likewise, as soon as one select succeeds, the selection is done - we don’t have to explicitly do anything except breaking from the loop. The select methods might from time to time even decide to block the current thread.

The idea is that we simply execute the same set of selection cases in a loop and break as soon as one of them succeeds. That’s all there is to it!

Great, but how would that really work?

The select methods access a hidden thread-local state machine to track the current state of selection. So selection actually works as a behind-the-scenes state machine whose input are calls to select methods.

In the first iteration of the loop, the state machine remembers the first case and counts how many cases there are. All cases return errors.

Then, in the second iteration, it goes around again and attempts to fire each case, essentially by calling try_recv and try_send .

If all tries fail, then in the third iteration all cases return errors again, but cases get registered along the way into the state machine’s conditional variable. After completing the last call to select in the third iteration, the current thread is blocked.

As soon as the thread is woken up, in the fourth iteration, all cases return errors, but channels get unregistered from the conditional variable.

The fifth iteration is the same as the second case - we attempt to fire each case in order. If all cases fail, we continue by registering them again.

That’s it. Obviously, there must be some rules one must follow when enumerating cases in a selection:

All cases must appear in the same order. As soon as a case succeeds, the loop must be broken.

Violating the rules would not lead to code unsafety, but might cause deadlocks, and similar kinds of weirdness. But I think this is not a big concern since the rules are easy to uphold. And even if there is some chance of accidentally breaking them, I believe the flexibility this selection mechanism would give us is totally worth it.

Finally, for additional convenience we could even support a few special selection cases, for example:

loop { // ... if select :: timeout ( Duration :: from_ms ( 100 )) { // Fires after 100 milliseconds. break ; } if select :: disconnected () { // Fires if all selected channels are disconnected. break ; } }

Final words

That would be all! I hope this post shed some light onto some of the decisions behind the design of std::sync::mpsc and showed that there’s more to be desired from a channel that what it offers.

The alternative channel and selection API I’ve just proposed might sound too ambitious or too unrealistic. Coming up with an API is the easiest part, but how would one even implement it, and at the same time also improve performance over std::sync::mpsc ?

That is the question I want to answer in a follow-up post.