rust/concurrency.md

% Concurrency and Paralellism

Safe Rust features *a ton* of tooling to make concurrency and parallelism totally
safe, easy, and fearless. This is a case where we'll really just
[defer to TRPL][trpl-conc] for the basics.

TL;DR: The `Send` and `Sync` traits in conjunction with Rust's ownership model and
normal generic bounds make using concurrent APIs really easy and painless for
a user of Safe Rust.

Data Races and Race Conditions

Safe Rust guarantees an absence of data races, which are defined as:

• two or more threads concurrently accessing a location of memory
• one of them is a write
• one of them is unsynchronized

A data race has Undefined Behaviour, and is therefore impossible to perform in Safe Rust. Data races are mostly prevented through rust's ownership system: it's impossible to alias a mutable reference, so it's impossible to perform a data race. Interior mutability makes this more complicated, which is largely why we have the Send and Sync traits (see below).

However Rust does not prevent general race conditions. This is pretty fundamentally impossible, and probably honestly undesirable. Your hardware is racy, your OS is racy, the other programs on your computer are racy, and the world this all runs in is racy. Any system that could genuinely claim to prevent all race conditions would be pretty awful to use, if not just incorrect.

So it's perfectly "fine" for a Safe Rust program to get deadlocked or do something incredibly stupid with incorrect synchronization. Obviously such a program isn't very good, but Rust can only hold your hand so far. Still, a race condition can't violate memory safety in a Rust program on its own. Only in conjunction with some other unsafe code can a race condition actually violate memory safety. For instance:

use std::thread;
use std::sync::atomic::{AtomicUsize, Ordering};
use std::sync::Arc;

let data = vec![1, 2, 3, 4];
// Arc so that the memory the AtomicUsize is stored in still exists for
// the other thread to increment, even if we completely finish executing
// before it. Rust won't compile the program without it, because of the
// lifetime requirements of thread::spawn!
let idx = Arc::new(AtomicUsize::new(0));
let other_idx = idx.clone();

// `move` captures other_idx by-value, moving it into this thread
thread::spawn(move || {
    // It's ok to mutate idx because this value
    // is an atomic, so it can't cause a Data Race.
    other_idx.fetch_add(10, Ordering::SeqCst);
});

// Index with the value loaded from the atomic. This is safe because we
// read the atomic memory only once, and then pass a *copy* of that value
// to the Vec's indexing implementation. This indexing will be correctly
// bounds checked, and there's no chance of the value getting changed
// in the middle. However our program may panic if the thread we spawned
// managed to increment before this ran. A race condition because correct
// program execution (panicing is rarely correct) depends on order of
// thread execution.
println!("{}", data[idx.load(Ordering::SeqCst)]);

if idx.load(Ordering::SeqCst) < data.len() {
    unsafe {
        // Incorrectly loading the idx *after* we did the bounds check.
        // It could have changed. This is a race condition, *and dangerous*
        // because we decided to do `get_unchecked`, which is `unsafe`.
        println!("{}", data.get_unchecked(idx.load(Ordering::SeqCst)));
    }
}

Send and Sync

Not everything obeys inherited mutability, though. Some types allow you to multiply alias a location in memory while mutating it. Unless these types use synchronization to manage this access, they are absolutely not thread safe. Rust captures this with through the Send and Sync traits.

• A type is Send if it is safe to send it to another thread.
• A type is Sync if it is safe to share between threads (&T is Send).

Send and Sync are very fundamental to Rust's concurrency story. As such, a substantial amount of special tooling exists to make them work right. First and foremost, they're unsafe traits. This means that they are unsafe to implement, and other unsafe code can trust that they are correctly implemented. Since they're marker traits (they have no associated items like methods), correctly implemented simply means that they have the intrinsic properties an implementor should have. Incorrectly implementing Send or Sync can cause Undefined Behaviour.

Send and Sync are also what Rust calls opt-in builtin traits. This means that, unlike every other trait, they are automatically derived: if a type is composed entirely of Send or Sync types, then it is Send or Sync. Almost all primitives are Send and Sync, and as a consequence pretty much all types you'll ever interact with are Send and Sync.

Major exceptions include:

• raw pointers are neither Send nor Sync (because they have no safety guards)
• UnsafeCell isn't Sync (and therefore Cell and RefCell aren't)
• Rc isn't Send or Sync (because the refcount is shared and unsynchronized)

Rc and UnsafeCell are very fundamentally not thread-safe: they enable unsynchronized shared mutable state. However raw pointers are, strictly speaking, marked as thread-unsafe as more of a lint. Doing anything useful with a raw pointer requires dereferencing it, which is already unsafe. In that sense, one could argue that it would be "fine" for them to be marked as thread safe.

However it's important that they aren't thread safe to prevent types that contain them from being automatically marked as thread safe. These types have non-trivial untracked ownership, and it's unlikely that their author was necessarily thinking hard about thread safety. In the case of Rc, we have a nice example of a type that contains a *mut that is definitely not thread safe.

Types that aren't automatically derived can opt-in to Send and Sync by simply implementing them:

struct MyBox(*mut u8);

unsafe impl Send for MyBox {}
unsafe impl Sync for MyBox {}

In the incredibly rare case that a type is inappropriately automatically derived to be Send or Sync, then one can also unimplement Send and Sync:

struct SpecialThreadToken(u8);

impl !Send for SpecialThreadToken {}
impl !Sync for SpecialThreadToken {}

Note that in and of itself it is impossible to incorrectly derive Send and Sync. Only types that are ascribed special meaning by other unsafe code can possible cause trouble by being incorrectly Send or Sync.

Most uses of raw pointers should be encapsulated behind a sufficient abstraction that Send and Sync can be derived. For instance all of Rust's standard collections are Send and Sync (when they contain Send and Sync types) in spite of their pervasive use raw pointers to manage allocations and complex ownership. Similarly, most iterators into these collections are Send and Sync because they largely behave like an & or &mut into the collection.

TODO: better explain what can or can't be Send or Sync. Sufficient to appeal only to data races?

Atomics

Rust pretty blatantly just inherits LLVM's model for atomics, which in turn is largely based off of the C11 model for atomics. This is not due these models being particularly excellent or easy to understand. Indeed, these models are quite complex and are known to have several flaws. Rather, it is a pragmatic concession to the fact that everyone is pretty bad at modeling atomics. At very least, we can benefit from existing tooling and research around C's model.

Trying to fully explain these models is fairly hopeless, so we're just going to drop that problem in LLVM's lap.

Actually Doing Things Concurrently

Rust as a language doesn't really have an opinion on how to do concurrency or parallelism. The standard library exposes OS threads and blocking sys-calls because everyone has those and they're uniform enough that you can provide an abstraction over them in a relatively uncontroversial way. Message passing, green threads, and async APIs are all diverse enough that any abstraction over them tends to involve trade-offs that we weren't willing to commit to for 1.0.

However Rust's current design is setup so that you can set up your own concurrent paradigm or library as you see fit. Just require the right lifetimes and Send and Sync where appropriate and everything should Just Work with everyone else's stuff.