Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Communicating through message passing

Threads can also communicate with each other through a more high level abstraction called message passing. This model of thread communication removes the need to use explicit locks by the user.

The standard library's std::sync::mpsc module provides a lock-free multi-producer, single-subscriber queue, which serves as a shared message queue for threads wanting to communicate with one another. The mpsc module standard library has two kinds of channels:

• channel: This is an asynchronous, infinite buffer channel.
• sync_channel: This is a synchronous, bounded buffer channel.

Channels can be used to send data from one thread to another. Let's look at asynchronous channels first.