One thing that you notice after spending most of your time looking at the insides of a program, is that it’s very easy to get bogged down in implementation detail, and end up with rather an optimistic view of how well the world outside of your application works. This is an especially common theme in the distributed systems field, and Peter Deutsch’s infamous Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing are a good example of this.

I recently read a blog post from Adrian Colyer on the paper “Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed, Concurrent, Fault-Tolerant Code“. I’ve been fiddling with the idea of implementing distributed systems in Rust recently, so I figured I’d spend some seeing how well they fit together.

A principal contribution of the paper itself, is the description of an implementation pattern where rather than having input events from the outside world drive a traditional state machine directly, we split the event handling into updating our understanding of the world, and then acting based on the updated state. This happens to be quite similar to how some bottom-up logic programming systems are implemented, so I suspect that there’s a lot of scope for seeing how logic programming can be applied here. Especially in light of ideas such as Bloom.

In the paper, they give the example of the Hadoop Job tracker, and note that it’s implemented using a fairly traditional state machine mechanism, where nodes in the graph are represented by an Java enumeration type, and handlers are attached to state transition arcs. In total, this takes up about weighs in at a rather less efficient 2250 lines of Java to implement. They find that the handlers often represent quite similar actions, and so those handlers can contain a lot of duplicated code. They provide a link to a re-implementation of the model in python in approximately 120 lines of code, and demonstrate that is behaviorally equivalent to the original. If nothing else, it makes it far easier to get a feel for the shape of the code just by reading it.

So, in the spirit of reductive examples everywhere, our example comes in the form of a chat server. Where the paper operates on top of an existing RPC abstraction, we apply it directly on top of the socket interface provided by mio. The bulk of our processing happens in the Handler#ready method of our handler. So in the terminology of the paper, we have two tasks, namely listening for new connections, and handling established connections.

Because our tasks operate mostly at the transport layer, our events are essentially socket readiness notifications, and the bulk of the actions include such exciting things as reading/writing from sockets. For example, the event handler for the listening socket is mostly trivial, and that for each connection is remarkably similar.

Then the bulk of the activity happens in the Listener#process_rules method.

So, when our listening socket is readable (IE: has a client attempting to connect), we accept(2) the connection, and notify the service of the connection, by passing a MiChatCommand::NewConnection into the queue of outstanding actions to be processed. The Connection#process_rules method is a little more complex, as it handles both reading, writing to the socket, and invokes Connection#process_buffer to actually parse the input into “frames” (lines in this case).

Whenever we see a full line of input from the client, we pass a MiChatCommand::Broadcast , we pass that to MiChat#process_action , which will in turn enqueue the message on each connection for output.

The rules processing in the Handler#ready implementation then halts once everything we are concerned about has quiesced; in this case, when no more actions are generated by our rules.

Personally, I do like this approach; it seems easier to end up with code that is well factored, and can potentially encourage a reasonable layering of concerns. For example, it is fairly easy to separate the frame handling code from that which deals with the underlying socket manipulation by thinking of it as a stack of adapters, each of which bridging a few layers from the ISO layer model, which ultimately communicates with your application model.

The full code can be found in the mio-rules-example.