Telephonic Whispers in Rust

/* ---[ CSP: an idea whose time has come ]--- */

Of late, the Go language has popularized the CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) style of programming. Rob Pike gives a great talk on Go's implementation of CSP with Go channels and goroutines in this presentation: Google I/O 2012 - Go Concurrency Patterns.

After watching that presentation, I myself got inspired and wrote a Go-inspired CSP library in Clojure. Later, Rich Hickey and team came and built an even better version, core.async, that has gotten a lot of acclaim.

Recently, I've been learning the Rust language and was intrigued and happy to see that the CSP model is also embraced front-and-center by the Rust team. Like Go, the core primitive for message passing is a channel and Rust has lightweight routines (green threads), called tasks in Rust.

One of the first things I did when implementing a CSP library in Go was to port Pike's Go examples from this Google I/O talk to Clojure. Here I do that in Rust for the "Chinese Whispers" example.

/* ---[ Telephonic Whispers ]--- */

Pike shows this example in his 2012 Heroku presentation to show off the idea that you can spawn up a lot of lightweight goroutines and have it run efficiently. Since Rust tasks are lightweight, I wanted to test whether Rust would behave similarly.

In the Chinese Whispers example, a daisy-chain of go routines are formed and they communicate unidirectionally along a series of channels. Go routine A signals to B who signals to C, etc. The message passed along the way is an integer than is incremented on each hand off.

With the Go example, you can run a daisy-chain of 100,000 go routines very efficiently:

$ time ./chinese-whispers 
100001

real    0m0.322s
user    0m0.215s
sys     0m0.105s

Here's my code to do the same in Rust (v 0.9):

A key difference is that in the Rust model a single channel actually comes in two parts: the port end, from which you receive, and a channel end, onto which you send data. The Go model has a single entity, the channel, which can be used for both sending and receiving, though you can create write-only or read-only channel handles.

This separation makes the Rust code a little more intricate and verbose. I also need additional variables, such as the temp variables on lines 16 and 17, since Rust pointers can only be owned by one entity at a time and sending them off into a task (via spawn) means that you've permanently transferred ownership of that reference.

Here is the running speed of the Rust version on my system:

$ time bin/chinese-whispers 
100001

real    0m4.234s
user    0m16.942s
sys     0m3.331s

So Rust can do it just fine, but it is not as efficient as Go. The Go version is about 13 times faster, based on these timed runs on my system.

---

[Update]: This blog post was discussed on Hacker News and Reddit soon after I published it. I've written a follow-up post addressing some of the complaints and summarizing some of the really interesting points in those community discussions: http://thornydev.blogspot.com/2014/01/telephonic-whispers-in-rust-revisited.html