Futures Explained in 200 Lines of Rust

This book aims to explain Futures in Rust using an example driven approach.

The goal is to get a better understanding of Futures by implementing a toy Reactor, a very simple Executor and our own Futures.

We'll start off a bit differently than most other explanations. Instead of deferring some of the details about what's special about futures in Rust we try to tackle that head on first. We'll be as brief as possible, but as thorough as needed. This way, most question will be answered and explored up front.

We'll end up with futures that can run an any executor like tokio and async_str.

In the end I've made some reader exercises you can do if you want to fix some of the most glaring omissions and shortcuts we took and create a slightly better example yourself.

What does this book give you that isn't covered elsewhere?

That's a valid question. There are many good resources and examples already. First of all, this book will focus on Futures and async/await specifically and not in the context of any specific runtime.

Secondly, I've always found small runnable examples very exiting to learn from. Thanks to Mdbook the examples can even be edited and explored further. It's all code that you can download, play with and learn from.

We'll and end up with an understandable example including a Future implementation, an Executor and a Reactor in less than 200 lines of code. We don't rely on any dependencies or real I/O which means it's very easy to explore further and try your own ideas.

Credits and thanks

I'll like to take the chance of thanking the people behind mio, tokio, async_std, Futures, libc, crossbeam and many other libraries which so much is built upon. Reading and exploring some of this code is nothing less than impressive. Even the RFCs that much of the design is built upon is written in a way that mortal people can understand, and that requires a lot of work. So thanks!