Book: Rust Atomics and Locks

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2024-05-10 06:00:06

Learning low level concurrency primitives through Rust! I read the book "Rust Atomics and Locks" by Mara Bos, and it helped me develop my understanding of, and build an intuition for, how atomics work in modern computers.

To me, the most interesting chapters of the book are Chapter 2. Atomics and Chapter 3. Memory Ordering. Other parts of the book build on these two chapters and show us how to create higher level primitives on top of atomics.

To build a standard library for Rust with useful multi-threading primitives like Mutex, or third-party APIs like Tokio's Channel, we need to have a means of building those primitives.

It's completely possible to have a solid systems programming career without ever needing to know about memory ordering or atomics. But it doesn't hurt to know about them either — They're building blocks for the things that you do use.

Atomics enable us to share information between threads in a data race free way. The tools we have in the toolbox are atomic variables, and atomic fences.